WordPress performance is rarely one silver bullet. It is a set of habits that compound — or a set of shortcuts that accumulate debt.
Measure before you tune
Establish baselines for LCP, CLS, and INP on the templates that matter: home, key landing pages, and authenticated views if you have them. Guessing wastes sprints.
Images and fonts first
Oversized heroes and unsubsetted fonts are frequent LCP villains. Prefer modern formats, sensible dimensions, and font-display strategies that avoid invisible text.
Be ruthless with scripts
Every plugin and tag manager snippet wants a piece of the main thread. Audit what loads on each template. Defer what you can; delete what you cannot justify.
Cache with intent
Page caching, object caching, and CDN edge rules should match how editors actually publish. A cache strategy that fights the CMS creates workarounds — and workarounds create outages.
Performance is a product feature. Treat it like one in every release.