The challenge
The site ran on the Avada theme with Fusion Builder. Mobile PageSpeed was 45.
Common free plugins made it worse: deferring JavaScript hid homepage content and broke features.
What I did
- Tested and rolled back plugin combinations that conflicted with Avada, then moved to WP Rocket.
- Configured CSS combining, unused CSS removal and delayed JavaScript with exclusions for the theme scripts that must run early.
- Lazy-loaded images while excluding the hero image, hosted Google Fonts locally and compressed images.
- Cleaned the database and fixed audit findings for excess CSS and JS files and the sitemap.
- Wrote meta descriptions for seven key pages and delivered a client report with remaining recommendations.
The outcome
Desktop performance rose from 79 to 91 and mobile from 45 to 63.
Render-blocking resources dropped by 70% and total blocking time was removed.
