Title:WordPress + Elementor site has terrible Lighthouse/GTmetrix performance despite trying almost everything – what am I missing?
Hi everyone,
I'm working on a WordPress website for a car dealership and I'm struggling with performance, especially on mobile Lighthouse/PageSpeed.
The website is currently still a staging site and is not indexed, but it is publicly accessible.
My setup
- WordPress
- Elementor / Elementor Pro
- Motors – Car Dealership & Classified Listings plugin
- LiteSpeed Cache
- QUIC.cloud
- Optimole
- Google Fonts
- Jarallax/parallax effects on the hero sections
- Cloudflare/QUIC.cloud CDN setup
- HTTPS
- LiteSpeed server
Theme used: https://reactheme.com/products/wordpress/autovault/
The homepage is fairly complex because it contains the vehicle search/filter, hero section, vehicle listings, etc.
Current performance
PageSpeed Insights mobile is usually around:
- Performance: ~50–55
- FCP: ~11–13 seconds
- LCP: ~30 seconds in Lighthouse
- TBT: usually very low, around 20–130 ms
- CLS: ~0–0.03
Interestingly, Chrome local testing is much better:
- Local LCP: around 2.2–2.6 seconds
- CLS: around 0–0.03
- INP: around 16–40 ms
GTmetrix currently shows approximately:
- Performance: 46%
- Structure: 75%
- LCP: 7.7s
- TBT: 166ms
- CLS: 0.13
- Total page size: ~5 MB
- Requests: ~164
- JS: ~2.07 MB
- CSS: ~1.66 MB
- Fonts: ~900 KB
What I've already tried
I've already done quite a lot of optimization:
- Enabled LiteSpeed Cache
- Connected/synced QUIC.cloud
- Enabled CDN
- Minification/optimization options
- Optimized image loading
- Optimole image optimization
- WebP/AVIF images
- Lazy loading where appropriate
- Google Fonts optimization
- JS defer/delay
- CSS optimization
- Browser caching
- Cache settings
- Added
fetchpriority="high"to the main/LCP image - Removed some unnecessary effects
- Tested with and without Jarallax
- Tested the hero image as a background image
- Tested the hero image as an Elementor Image widget
- Removed some fade/parallax effects
- Checked the Network tab in Chrome DevTools
- Checked the LCP breakdown in Lighthouse
- Checked GTmetrix Waterfall
The main hero image is now being requested from Optimole and has fetchpriority="high".
One thing I noticed
Lighthouse says the LCP is the Jarallax hero image.
The LCP breakdown looks something like:
- TTFB: ~30–50 ms
- Resource load delay: ~700–1000 ms
- Resource load duration: ~50–90 ms
- Element render delay: ~1.8–2.4 seconds
So it seems like the actual image download isn't necessarily the biggest problem. The browser is discovering/loading it relatively quickly, but the element isn't rendered immediately.
GTmetrix also shows a huge amount of CSS and JavaScript being loaded.
I have around 75 CSS requests and 60 JS requests, so I'm wondering if Elementor/Motors/WooCommerce are loading a lot of assets that aren't actually needed on the homepage.
"text was created by AI because my english is poor but whole text is exactly right"
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