// Case study
Core Web Vitals recovery for a regional publishing group
Mobile LCP sat at 5.4s on a 38-plugin WordPress estate, block migration, CDN tuning, and script deferral brought field LCP to 2.0s and recovered organic impressions.
- A regional publishing group operating three WordPress properties, roughly 220,000 combined monthly sessions, engaged Simplileap after Google Search Console flagged sustained "Poor" URL experience on mobile. CrUX field data showed LCP at 5.4 seconds on article templates, INP above 350ms on category pages, and CLS spikes when ad slots injected above the fold.
- Initial audit: each property ran a different page-builder stack (Elementor on two sites, WPBakery on the third), 38 active plugins across the estate, no object cache, and hero images served at full camera resolution without srcset. Marketing relied on inline custom CSS per post, which bloated HTML and blocked first paint. Editorial could not accept a full redesign mid-quarter, the mandate was measurable speed gain without pausing publishing.
- Problems we hit early: deferring jQuery broke a legacy comments widget on one property; removing a "performance" plugin that was actually duplicating analytics tags caused a reporting gap until GTM was re-mapped; and Cloudflare's Auto Minify conflicted with a theme bundler, producing intermittent 404s on combined CSS until we disabled minify at the edge and handled it in WP Rocket instead.