The site has grown into a large map: products, services, industries, case studies, company pages, and operating pages. The navigation treated that map like a small brochure.
On the first load it was initiating roughly sixty route prefetches. That meant the browser was asking for a large part of the site before the visitor had chosen where to go. More links had produced less responsive navigation.
The initial route-prefetch count is now two.
This does not remove the pages or make the navigation inert. It changes the loading priority. The current page and its visuals get the bandwidth first. Likely next destinations can still be requested when they become relevant instead of competing during the opening frame.
Why this mattered beyond a score
The defect was felt while switching sections. The site has a persistent moving background and layered visual treatment, so unnecessary route work competes with an experience that is already doing meaningful rendering.
The correction followed a simple rule: navigation should reveal the catalog, not download the catalog.
Performance work is often described as shrinking assets. Sometimes it is deciding that most work should not happen yet. The fastest request is the one the browser never had to make.