How I Got a WordPress Site from PageSpeed 54 to 100 (Step by Step)

A client came to me with a WordPress site scoring 54 on Google PageSpeed Insights (mobile). Load time was 8 seconds. Core Web Vitals were all failing. Seven days later, the same site scored 100/100 on Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. Load time dropped to under 2 seconds. Here is exactly how I did it, step by step. The Starting Point PageSpeed Insights mobile score: 54/100 Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): 6.2s Total Blocking Time (TBT): 1,800ms Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): 0.32 Load time: 8+ seconds on a mobile connection The site was a standard WordPress build with Elementor, 12 plugins, unoptimized images, and render-blocking CSS/JS everywhere. Step 0: Understand the Scoring System Before touching any code, I read the Lighthouse 10 scoring documentation . This matters because the five metrics are weighted differently: Metric Weight Total Blocking Time (TBT) 30% Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) 25% Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) 25% First Contentful Paint (FCP) 10% Sp