How do you strike the right balance between bold marketing website design and fast load speeds?

[jessica1190smith]

I’ve spent my entire week debating with our creative director over our upcoming site redesign. Their mandate: we need to implement slick, heavy-hitting WebGL graphics, full-screen background videos and eye-popping interactive cursor animations to make our brand appear as on-trend as humanly possible. At the opposite end of the spectrum, our performance marketer is shaking in his boots, convinced all of those flashy visual trimmings will kill our Core Web Vitals scores and completely obliterate our conversion rate on mobile.
What are your go-to strategies and frameworks when designing a new marketing website? Is it even possible to strike a balance that creates a truly memorable and highly effective experience that also prioritises speedy page load times? What’s your advice on the animation libraries, asset compression and overall tech stack that you utilise to keep performance in check?
What have your experiences been – have you seen heavily animated, visually complex websites actually perform well when it comes to conversions, or is good old-fashioned simplicity always king?
Share some of your favourite examples of marketing website design that successfully managed to nail the ‘show, don’t tell’ with equally impressive visuals and performance.