The problem
The site failed Core Web Vitals on realistic mobile connections across the board. Server response was slow, pages shipped megabytes of assets, and ad loading shifted content visibly during reading.
The solution
A measurement-first pass: profiling queries, asset payloads and third-party behavior. The theme was replaced with a custom block theme carrying an explicit CSS budget; caching was restructured; images moved to WebP with correct dimensions; third-party scripts were deferred and consolidated.
Implementation
- Plugin overhead was audited feature by feature; several were replaced with smaller equivalents.
- Critical CSS was made deterministic; the rest deferred.
- Ad containers were reserved with fixed dimensions to eliminate layout shift.
Results
Placeholder — replace with verified client results before publishing. No performance scores are invented.
Lessons learned
No redesign was needed. The expensive problems were structural — asset strategy and plugin overhead — and were fixable in place once measured.
