Gaining high speed for a small website is easier than keeping that speed as your site grows. There are numerous reasons for this e.g.:
- Giving non-technical people a CMS (where they'll upload unoptimised images).
- Feature creep.
- More complicated infrastructure (geo-distributed, load balanced infrastructure, etc). Tuning is definitely still possible but harder.
- Politics (e.g. trying to remove some pointless JS or CSS could take months and require several meetings).
- The absolute cost of doing anything grows.
Google and others have shown that large web-sites can keep things fast, but they've also shown it takes the entire organisation prioritising that for it to happen. I'm sure big media sites would benefit from being faster, in a measurable way, but the key is: Can you get other (non-technical) departments to agree to make real-world cuts to make that happen? Maybe.
- Giving non-technical people a CMS (where they'll upload unoptimised images).
- Feature creep.
- More complicated infrastructure (geo-distributed, load balanced infrastructure, etc). Tuning is definitely still possible but harder.
- Politics (e.g. trying to remove some pointless JS or CSS could take months and require several meetings).
- The absolute cost of doing anything grows.
Google and others have shown that large web-sites can keep things fast, but they've also shown it takes the entire organisation prioritising that for it to happen. I'm sure big media sites would benefit from being faster, in a measurable way, but the key is: Can you get other (non-technical) departments to agree to make real-world cuts to make that happen? Maybe.