The challenge The goal was to improve Core Web Vitals on an existing WordPress website. The obvious approach was to start optimizing assets and adding/configuring caching. But the website had a custom-coded child theme, Genesis and Gravity Forms, so optimization changes could affect functionality. The problem Some changes improved the performance score but made the actual website worse. This meant the objective couldn't simply be: “Get a better PageSpeed score.”

The objective was to improve performance without breaking the site. My approach I first looked at how the existing WordPress stack worked together rather than immediately adding more optimization. I investigated the interaction between:

Theme and custom code

Gravity Forms

Caching/optimization

Page assets

Core Web Vitals The focus was on identifying the actual bottleneck and making targeted changes rather than applying a generic optimization checklist. Key takeaway A better performance score doesn't automatically mean a better website.

For WordPress projects, performance work needs to consider the entire stack — not just the number shown by a testing tool.