How BN Reports Got Faster Without Risking the Reports

BN Reports is an all-in-one platform for Canadian home inspectors — AI-assisted inspection reports, a mobile app, scheduling, and a client portal. The product worked. What nobody had put a number on was what it cost to load.

That is the usual shape of this kind of work. Nothing is broken, so nothing gets measured, and the cost sits there quietly for years.

What We Found

Two things stood out, and neither was visible from inside the product.

The first: the homepage autoplayed a 5.9 MB video on every single visit. Home inspectors open this on job sites, on phone connections — precisely the audience least able to absorb a download that size.

The second was stranger. The product had never once rendered in its own typeface. The stylesheet asked for Inter from a font service, but the build pipeline was silently discarding that request — the compiled bundle contained no reference to it at all. Every screen had been falling back to whatever font the device happened to have, for the entire life of the product. It had gone unnoticed because the browser function that reports whether a font is available answers “yes” in exactly that situation. You cannot catch it by asking; you have to measure the text.

What We Changed

The video was re-encoded to about 40% of its original weight, and checked against the source with a perceptual quality metric to confirm there was no visible loss. It no longer loads on arrival: a still image appears first, the video loads only if it is scrolled into view, and it skips itself entirely on slow connections, data-saver mode, or when the visitor has asked for reduced motion.

Inter is now served from BN Reports’ own domain through the framework’s font pipeline. That fixed the typography, and it removed a third-party request from every page load — which matters more than it sounds, because the product advertises GDPR readiness and a font-service call is a third-party call.

The visual refresh itself was made at the design-token layer rather than screen by screen. Because the codebase already referred to colours and weights by name rather than by value, retuning those definitions restyled the whole product at once. One typographic weight change landed across roughly nine hundred usages without any of them being edited individually.

The most important part of this engagement is what we left alone.

What We Deliberately Did Not Touch

The inspection editor runs to over six thousand lines. Separately, a set of files renders the PDF that an inspector’s customer actually receives. We left both alone.

In those files a visual change is not a visual change — it is a change to the product’s deliverable. Because the styling was rebuilt at the token layer, those screens inherited the new look anyway, without anyone editing the code that produces the most important thing the business ships.

The Value Today

BN Reports loads lighter, looks the way it was meant to look, and makes one fewer outside request on every visit. None of that came at the cost of the reports themselves.

The most important part of this engagement is what we left alone.