An Invitation to Look
On September 28, 2026, a marketing email from NP Digital landed in my inbox about its work with Stratos Jet Charters.
The email described how NP Digital had studied a Google algorithm update, analyzed the site's performance, monitored its competitors, and developed a plan around what the data revealed.
One statement immediately caught my attention: NP Digital had analyzed the site's performance. Website performance is something I regularly check.
When someone tells me they analyzed a site's performance, naturally, I want to see how that site performs.
So I did what I normally do.
I opened the Stratos Jet Charters website and pressed F12.
Looking Beneath the Surface
The Stratos Jet Charters website was active and functioning. I wasn't looking for something to be wrong with it. I wanted to see what its performance looked like today. I opened Chrome DevTools and ran Lighthouse. The first report returned:
Performance 75
Accessibility 79
Best Practices 73
SEO 77
I ran it again in Incognito. Performance came back at 69, and a later run reached 92.
The changing score wasn't the finding. Lighthouse is a snapshot, and performance scores can vary between runs.
What interested me was what the audit was showing underneath the scores. I found missing alt text, links without descriptive text, an unnamed phone link, an uncrawlable link, image aspect-ratio issues, and a missing web app manifest.
Then I looked deeper. The site's Organization schema still referenced Google+, along with other older social links. There was commented-out font code, repeated preload warnings, and a JSON-LD parsing issue appearing in the console around the Meta Pixel.
None of those things meant the website wasn't working. But they did make me wonder how long some of what I was seeing had been sitting underneath it.
What Was Coming?
The email had also said NP Digital gave Stratos a three-month head start to prepare for an upcoming Google algorithm update while competitors struggled to adapt.
That made me curious for a different reason. What Google update were they talking about? The email had just arrived on September 28, 2026, and I wondered whether something had recently changed in search that I hadn't heard about.
More importantly, what did NP Digital know three months ahead of time that told them Stratos needed to prepare? The email didn't identify the update or link me directly to the Stratos case study, so I went looking for it.
I searched for the NP Digital Stratos Jet Charters case study and for the Google algorithm update it described. That's when the timeline changed everything.
The case study had been published in 2022.
Four Years Earlier
I stopped.
The email that had sent me looking for this information arrived on September 28, 2026. I had been searching for the Google update as though I might have missed something recent.
Instead, the case study describing the three-month head start had been published roughly four years earlier. The age of the case study didn't make the work or its results irrelevant.
What interested me was why this particular story had been brought back into the conversation now. The email also reported:
119% more page-one keywords
40% average traffic growth across top location pages
21,392% more new keywords ranking
Those were impressive numbers. But now I was looking at them differently. This wasn't a recent change in search I had somehow missed. It was a historical success story being presented to me in 2026.
Why this case study? Why now?
And since NP Digital had opened this exploration by talking about analyzing website performance, another question was beginning to form:
What did its own website look like today?
Applying the Same Lens
NP Digital had put website performance at the beginning of this trail. Its email told me that analyzing Stratos's site performance had been part of the work behind the results it was presenting.
That statement was what prompted me to open DevTools and look beneath the Stratos website for myself.
Now I had followed another part of the email into a case study from 2022.
So I became curious about the website presenting that success story to me in 2026.
I opened the NP Digital website and applied the same lens.
I started with the Stratos Jet Charters case study page and ran Lighthouse.The first report returned:
Performance 40
Accessibility 90
Best Practices 54
SEO 92
The score wasn't what caught my attention.
It was what I found underneath it.
The Tools Had Accumulated
I opened the Performance audit to see what was contributing to the score.
The page was carrying scripts and services from Google Tag Manager, Chili Piper, Facebook, HubSpot, Microsoft Clarity, LinkedIn, Cookie-Script, Cloudflare, and Trustpilot.
Lighthouse also identified render-blocking resources, unused JavaScript and CSS, long main-thread tasks, image-delivery opportunities, and cache issues.
The page transferred roughly 4.5 MB of data. Lighthouse identified about 673 KB of unused JavaScript, while JavaScript execution consumed roughly 4.5 seconds of CPU time and main-thread work totaled about 7.4 seconds.
No single tool told the whole story.
What caught my attention was the accumulation.
Each service may have been added for a reason. But looking at them together raised a different set of questions:
Which ones were still needed?
Which ones were still providing value?
Had anything been added over time without something else being removed?
I had started this exploration because an email said NP Digital had analyzed a site's performance.
Now I was looking beneath NP Digital's own site and seeing exactly why website performance needs to be revisited over time.
Was It Just the Old Page?
The Stratos case study had been published in 2022, so there was an obvious possibility.
Maybe some of what I was seeing had simply accumulated on an older page.
I opened the current NP Digital homepage and ran Lighthouse again.
Performance returned 33.
The audit estimated about 3.8 seconds of potential savings from render-blocking resources and identified roughly 707 KB of unused JavaScript.
Main-thread work totaled about 7.9 seconds, and the page transferred roughly 5.9 MB.
Many of the same marketing and tracking services appeared there too, along with first-party images, stylesheets, unused CSS and JavaScript, and a DOM containing more than 1,600 elements.
So the complexity I had found wasn't confined to the old case-study page.
It was present on the current homepage too.
And suddenly the trail had come full circle.
An email telling me about the value of analyzing a site's performance had prompted me to do exactly that.
First to Stratos.
Then to NP Digital.
What Accumulates Underneath
Both websites had led me to the same thought from different directions.
A website doesn't have to stop working for things underneath it to become outdated, unnecessary, or simply forgotten.
A social platform disappears, but its link remains in the schema. A tracking tool gets added for a campaign. Another service is installed later. Code gets commented out instead of removed. Scripts, integrations, tags, and other remnants can quietly accumulate while the website continues doing its job.
From the front, there may be little reason to suspect any of it is there.
That's why maintaining a website also means looking at what has accumulated underneath it.
Every so often, it is worth looking underneath and asking:
What is still here?
What do we still use?
What can finally come out?
A website can keep working for years without anyone asking those questions.
And that's how a perfectly respectable website can quietly grow a rat's nest underneath it. 🐀
