Squeezing every millisecond: performance patterns in Nuxt 4

Nuxt 4's rendering pipeline gives you more granular control than most teams actually use. Route-level rendering modes — full static, hybrid, or server-rendered — should be a deliberate decision per page, not a global default left untouched.

Image delivery is usually the single biggest performance lever on marketing sites. Pairing Nuxt Image with modern formats (AVIF first, WebP fallback) and explicit sizing routinely cuts Largest Contentful Paint in half compared to unoptimized image tags.

For component-heavy pages, lazy hydration matters more than code splitting alone. Deferring hydration of below-the-fold interactive components until they're near the viewport keeps Time to Interactive low without sacrificing interactivity.

None of this replaces measurement. Every project we ship includes a performance budget enforced in CI — if a pull request pushes Lighthouse below the agreed threshold, it doesn't merge.