Ch. 16: The Speed Fix Checklist That Reversed a Soft Decline

Ch. 16: The Speed Fix Checklist That Reversed a Soft Decline

My recipe site's rankings drifted down for 2 months with no update to blame. The culprit was Core Web Vitals turning red after I'd bolted on plugins. I ran a cleanup.

— Ran PageSpeed on my 5 top money pages — LCP was 4.8s, way over the 2.5s line
— Deactivated 6 plugins I wasn't using — each was loading scripts site-wide
— Compressed and converted every image to WebP — cut page weight 60%
— Added lazy-loading below the fold and set explicit image dimensions to kill layout shift
— Moved to a lightweight theme — the bloated one was 40% of the problem

LCP dropped to 1.9s. Over 6 weeks the soft decline reversed, sessions recovered to prior peak.

Lesson banked: slow pages don't get a penalty notice. They just quietly slide. Audit speed before you blame Google.