Speed is a feature your users notice first
My second time in Skopje, four years after talking about progressive web apps there. This time the topic was Core Web Vitals, which by 2023 had become something every client asked about.
There was no video recording for this one, but the slides are below and the same material is in the Learn WordPress workshop I gave a few months later.
Start with the slow parts nobody sees
Hosting, DNS and PHP version decide how fast your first byte arrives. You can’t optimise your way out of a bad server. If the site lives on cheap shared hosting with hundreds of neighbours, that is the first fix.
The WordPress-specific slowdowns
WP_Query is powerful and easy to misuse. Multi-dimensional meta queries on a big postmeta table can bring a site to its knees. Cache expensive queries with the Transients API, or rethink the data model before adding more hardware.
The front-end checklist
Lazy-load images and serve them as WebP. Host fonts locally with font-display: swap. Inline critical CSS. Defer third-party embeds. Turn on Gzip or Brotli. Preconnect to the origins you need. None of this is glamorous, and all of it adds up.
A fast website means happy, loyal customers. Core Web Vitals give marketing, design and development one shared set of numbers to work towards, and that alone is worth a lot.
