Core Web Vitals Turnaround — Heavy Elementor Site

A regional behavioral health nonprofit's main site was failing CrUX field data on LCP, with a homepage built on Elementor Pro and a Hello Elementor child theme. Lab LCP was swinging 14–26 seconds depending on the run, and TBT was over 600ms. The client needed real-world performance fixed without a full rebuild.

I ran the optimization across two phases. First pass focused on caching and asset loading: enabled Elementor's Optimized Markup Performance, tuned LiteSpeed and Cloudflare cache rules, and audited Rocket Loader for inline-script breakage. Second pass went deeper — seven targeted patches including Typekit inline + font-display swap + preload, removing a 329KB Vimeo widget that wasn't earning its keep, and shipping 1.27MB of image savings via WebP conversion and Cloudflare-aware purge handling.

Stack: WordPress, Elementor Pro 4.x, Hello Elementor child theme, Cloudflare (Transform Rules, Snippets, WAF), LiteSpeed Cache, custom PHP hooks for asset dequeue.

Outcome: CrUX field data moved to passing across LCP, INP, and CLS. Lab Lighthouse Performance lifted +6 points, LCP cut by ~5 seconds, TBT reduced ~240ms. Stable in field for ongoing monitoring.

Tags: Core Web Vitals, WordPress, Elementor, Cloudflare, performance optimization, LCP, TBT