Engineering WordPress for real performance

WordPress gets a bad rap for performance — and most of the time, honestly, it deserves it. The average WordPress install ships with 20+ poorly-written plugins, no cache strategy, and images that haven’t been optimized since 2014.

But WordPress doesn’t have to be slow. I’ve built WordPress-based systems that hit 98/100 Core Web Vitals across LCP, FID/INP, and CLS — even with WooCommerce on top.

The four non-negotiables

One: a custom theme (or serious child theme) — no 50-feature-in-1 bloated parent themes. Two: aggressive asset loading so a page only enqueues the CSS and JS it actually needs. Three: object caching and page caching, properly. Four: off-site image optimization with automated WebP/AVIF generation.

None of these require abandoning WordPress. They just require treating it like the serious platform it is instead of a plugin playground.