/audit Skill

Every team has a deployment pipeline. Almost none have an optimization gate that verifies what actually lands on the wire before a search engine, an LLM crawler, or a mobile user touches it.

The /audit skill is the final gate in the Wanessa Labs development loop. It tests live production URLs against Google PageSpeed Insights benchmarks, Core Web Vitals runtime signals, Google Search Console parity, and agentic readiness—scoring every property on a rigorous 100-point scale.

Why Optimization Must Be The Final Step

Optimization cannot happen in the abstract while writing components. A feature can have clean React code and passing unit tests while simultaneously failing five critical production realities:

1. The Font CDN Tax: Referencing external font CDNs (fonts.googleapis.com) blocks the critical rendering path for 500–750ms on mobile 4G connections.
2. Non-Composited Animations: Animating properties like box-shadow, width, or margin triggers continuous paint and layout recalculations on the CPU, causing visible jank and degrading Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
3. Forced Synchronous Reflows: Interrogating geometry properties (offsetWidth, getBoundingClientRect()) immediately after modifying DOM nodes forces synchronous layout recalculations during hydration.
4. The SPA Soft-404 Trap: Standard single-page applications configure wildcard rewrites (/* /index.html 200) so direct navigation works. This causes broken URLs to return HTTP 200 with an empty shell, polluting search engine indexes with duplicate phantom content.
5. Redirect Friction: Missing trailing slashes on static internal links trigger unnecessary 301/308 redirect roundtrips on Cloudflare Pages edge servers.

The /audit skill was designed to catch every one of these regressions before declaring a build complete.

The Three Audit Pillars

The skill executes through an automated evaluation harness (audit-agentic.mjs) that inspects both static build artifacts and live network responses.

1. Core Web Vitals & Runtime Performance

• Self-Hosted Font Architecture: Zero external font CDNs. All typography is bundled locally via @fontsource with font-display: swap and preloaded .woff2 subsets.
• GPU-Composited Motion: Strict enforcement of composite-only animations. Pulsing status dots and indicators use transform: scale() and opacity exclusively, running on the GPU without triggering browser paint invalidation.
• Zero-Reflow Hydration: Dynamic layout measurements are refactored to CSS containers, ResizeObserver, or deferred until idle via requestAnimationFrame.
• Image Hygiene: Explicit width and height dimensions declared on all <img> elements to lock layout boxes before fetch, alongside full .webp/.avif conversion.

2. Search Engine & GSC Parity

• Authentic 404 Status Codes: Soft-404 wildcard traps are replaced with prerendered static route shells for all valid client paths, paired with an authentic 404.html that returns a true HTTP 404 header.
• Clean Trailing Slashes: Internal links, fallback navigations, and XML sitemaps strictly enforce trailing slash parity (/route/), eliminating 301/308 redirect penalties.
• Canonical Domain Consolidation: Validation that apex and www hostnames consolidate cleanly without diluting domain equity.

3. Agentic & Robot Discovery

• Structured AI Manifests: Validates the presence of /llms.txt and comprehensive /llms-full.txt fast paths with clean markdown link health.
• Alternate Link Discovery: Injects <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown" href="/llms.txt"> directly into <head>.
• Token Thrift & Semantic Landmarks: Audits the text-to-code efficiency, pruning bloated inline SVGs, script boilerplate, and enforcing semantic landmarks (<main>, <article>).

Proof of Work: 23-Project Full Fleet Audit

To validate the skill at scale, /audit was run across all 23 Cloudflare Pages projects deployed under Wanessa Labs.

The audit engine runs asynchronously across the entire 23-domain matrix in under 2.5 seconds, providing immediate feedback on whether any commit broke performance or crawlability.

The Discipline

A project is not complete when it compiles. A project is complete when it serves clean semantics, renders with 60fps composited hardware acceleration, responds with authentic HTTP status codes, and provides fast paths for both humans and AI agents. The /audit skill turns that discipline into an automated standard.