Core Web Vitals Overhaul for a Consumer Electronics Store
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Overview
What we built
A consumer electronics store's mobile pages were so slow that Google ranked them down and charged more for every ad click. We rebuilt the way the site loads and turned both problems around.
In plain terms: when shoppers opened a product page on their phone, the page took over 11 seconds to become usable. Google measures this, and the store's mobile PageSpeed score of 23 told the same story from the outside. Slow pages pushed the store down the organic search results, and because Google Ads also rewards fast landing pages, every paid click cost more than it should have. The store was paying twice for the same underlying problem.
We went through the site layer by layer rather than chasing one silver bullet. Images were converted to the lighter WebP and AVIF formats, 19 unused plugins came out, the styling needed for the first screen was inlined into the page, JavaScript was deferred until the content was already visible, a CDN was configured to serve files from closer to the shopper, and Redis object caching took repeat work off the server. The mobile PageSpeed score rose from 23 to 91, ad quality scores climbed from 4/10 to 8/10 with cost per click down 31%, and organic traffic grew 44% over 3 months.
The Problem
Slow pages, sliding rankings
The store sold consumer electronics to an audience that shops heavily on mobile, and mobile was exactly where the site performed worst. A PageSpeed score of 23 put it deep in the failing range, and product pages, the pages that actually take the money, needed more than 11 seconds before a shopper could tap anything. Plenty of visitors never waited that long.
The damage compounded through both acquisition channels. Google folds page experience into its rankings, so organic visibility slid on the very searches the store depended on. On the paid side, Google Ads scored the landing pages 4/10 for quality, and a low quality score means paying more for every click. The marketing budget bought less traffic each month while the site itself turned away the traffic it did buy.
The causes had accumulated rather than arrived all at once: heavy unoptimised images, 19 plugins that were installed but no longer earning their place, render-blocking CSS and JavaScript loading ahead of the content, no CDN between the origin server and the shopper, and no object cache, so the server rebuilt the same pages over and over again.
Heavy, unoptimised media
Product imagery shipped in heavyweight legacy formats, forcing every phone to download far more data than the screen ever needed before anything meaningful appeared.
Plugin sprawl
The platform carried 19 unused plugins, each loading its own scripts and styles into every page whether or not the page needed them.
Render-blocking code
CSS and JavaScript loaded ahead of the content, so browsers sat parsing code while shoppers stared at a blank or half-drawn screen.
No caching layer
With no CDN and no object cache, every request travelled to the origin server, which rebuilt the same product pages from scratch each time.
What it was costing them
Slow pages taxed the business on every channel at once. Organic rankings kept sliding, so free traffic shrank. Google Ads charged more per click because of the 4/10 quality scores, so paid traffic cost more. And the shoppers who did arrive faced pages that took over 11 seconds to respond, which is an open invitation to buy the same product somewhere faster.
The Solution
Site-wide speed overhaul
We started with a full performance audit rather than a list of guesses, measuring where the load time actually went on real product pages. That produced an ordered plan: fix the media first, strip out the dead weight, reorganise how the code loads, and then add the caching layers that stop the server repeating the same work.
Every image on the site was converted to the modern WebP and AVIF formats, cutting page weight without changing how products look to the shopper. The 19 unused plugins were removed outright. The CSS needed to draw the first screen was inlined into the page itself, and the remaining JavaScript was deferred so it loads after the content a shopper actually sees.
The final layer addressed delivery. A CDN now serves the site's assets from locations close to each visitor instead of a single origin, and Redis object caching holds the assembled data the platform previously rebuilt on every request. Together the two mean most of the work of serving a page is already done before the shopper asks for it.
Key decisions
Audit before touching anything
A full performance audit ranked every source of delay, so effort went where the measurements pointed rather than where opinions did.
Modern formats for every image
Converting the whole catalogue to WebP and AVIF cut the heaviest part of each page while keeping product photography identical for shoppers.
Remove, do not disable
The 19 unused plugins were removed entirely rather than switched off, taking their scripts, styles and update burden out of every future page load.
Load content first, code later
Critical CSS was inlined and JavaScript deferred, so the page a shopper sees is drawn before the code they cannot see arrives.
Cache at two layers
A CDN handles delivery near the visitor while Redis object caching spares the server from rebuilding the same data, attacking wait time at both ends.
Measurable Impact
What changed after launch
The mobile PageSpeed score rose from 23 to 91, and Largest Contentful Paint, the moment the main content appears, fell from 8.4 seconds to 1.2 seconds. Product pages that had taken over 11 seconds to become interactive now respond while a shopper is still deciding what to look at first.
The commercial metrics followed the technical ones. Google Ads quality scores improved from 4/10 to 8/10, which cut cost per click by 31% on the same campaigns. Organic search traffic, the channel the slow site had been quietly bleeding, grew by 44% over 3 months as rankings recovered.
Mobile speed
PageSpeed score of 23, deep in the failing range
PageSpeed score of 91 on the same mobile pages
Page loading
Main content appearing after 8.4 seconds
Largest Contentful Paint down to 1.2 seconds
Paid search
Quality scores of 4/10 inflating every click
Scores of 8/10 and cost per click down 31%
Organic traffic
Rankings sliding as slow pages were penalised
Traffic up 44% over 3 months
Headline results
Mobile PageSpeed score improved from 23 to 91
Largest Contentful Paint reduced from 8.4 seconds to 1.2 seconds
Google Ads quality scores improved from 4/10 to 8/10, reducing CPC by 31%
Organic search traffic increased by 44% over 3 months
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