Performance optimization · Core Web Vitals · Plugin consolidation
BDHomeBuyer
- mobile performance score
- 38 → 91
- desktop performance score
- 61 → 99
- plugins retired
- 18
BDHomeBuyer buys houses for cash across Ohio. The website is their sales funnel: paid traffic lands on it and fills out the offer form, so a slow page costs them leads. The site is a WordPress build on Elementor that had collected a lot of plugins over the years. They asked me to make it fast without redesigning it.
Before
On October 7, 2026, Google PageSpeed Insights gave the homepage a 38 on mobile and a 61 on desktop. On mobile, the first content showed up after 4.2 seconds, the main image after 5.9 seconds, and the page was unresponsive for 1.2 seconds while scripts ran. Accessibility, best practices, and SEO were already in the 90s. The problem was speed, not the build.
What I did
I went through the plugin list and removed 18 plugins, then wrote one small plugin to cover the few things the site actually needed from them. I compressed every image and set them up to serve as WebP. Each page now loads only the CSS it uses. Tracking scripts and third-party widgets load after the page is usable, and the reviews badge has its space reserved so the layout doesn’t jump. I did all of this on a staging copy first, measured it, then rolled it out to the live site one step at a time with a way to undo each step.
After
On October 16, 2026, the same homepage scored 91 on mobile and 99 on desktop. On mobile, the first content shows up in 1.4 seconds, the main image in 3.1 seconds, scripts block for 180 milliseconds, and there is no layout shift. On desktop the page paints in 0.3 seconds. The design, content, and forms didn’t change.
