Case Study: How April Moto Optimized Their WordPress Website

In 2021, April Moto contacted me to optimize the web performance of their company's WordPress website. According to basic synthetic testing tools, their site's score was poor. The Core Web Vitals were not passing and showed issues with FCP, LCP, and Total Blocking Time.

My WordPress webperf optimization stack consists mainly of 3 plugins:

• Imagify, my favorite tool for image compression and bulk conversion to WebP format;
• WP Rocket, which applies a large number of webperf optimizations such as CSS and JS file minification or image lazy-loading;
• Perfmatters, a lightweight plugin that provides better control over the resources loaded on the site, down to taxonomies or even individual pages.

Image Optimization

The simplest part of a webperf optimization is WordPress image optimization. With a plugin like Imagify, it is possible to bulk optimize all images already uploaded to the site, as well as those that will be published afterward. The optimization is done in real time, in a completely transparent way for the user.

Imagify also enables conversion of images to WebP format, saving up to 30% of their file size with no perceptible loss of quality to the human eye. To ensure the best support for users, Imagify rewrites the site's URLs to serve the WebP version of an image if it exists, and keeps the original format for incompatible browsers.

WP Rocket Configuration

The WP Rocket extension offers a large number of options. I will detail in a dedicated article the configuration I regularly use for my WordPress webperf optimizations, although it is important to keep in mind that every site and theme is different — the configuration must be adapted and fine-tuned for each technical environment in production.

Image Lazy-Loading

WP Rocket offers a very easy-to-use feature for media. In two clicks, lazy-loading is applied to all images on the site and to YouTube iframes present on April Moto's pages. This option significantly reduces the number of images loaded, but comes with minor drawbacks that are easy to fix with a more thorough optimization.

By default, all images were lazy-loaded on the site, which is not ideal for improving LCP since the browser doesn't know which image to start downloading until the page has begun rendering. To address this issue, the image exclusion field allowed defining identification rules for above-the-fold images:

• First, I identified the logo's filename and added it to the lazy-loading exclusions;
• The featured image of articles had a unique class, which I was able to use via an appropriate selector to exclude all main article images on the site.

💡 During this optimization, I noticed that the logo also present in the footer was flagged by Google PageSpeed as potentially lazy-loadable — this is a false signal. Since it is loaded in the header, by the time it appears in the footer, the logo is already in the user's cache and will only be downloaded once. Since the April Moto theme was custom-built, I was able to define a .no-lazy CSS class and applied it to all above-the-fold media to ensure the longevity of this optimization.

Optimized CSS and JS Assets

WP Rocket also allows optimizing CSS and JS resources. In just a few clicks, the site's CSS and JS resources were minified, and a defer attribute was added to all scripts on the site, unblocking page rendering for the user.

To go a step further, the option to delay JavaScript execution freed up the user's processor and reduced April Moto's Total Blocking Time. Files are only executed once the user has interacted with the page (mouse movement, click, keyboard input).

Using WordPress Filters

All of these tips come from straightforward configurations, though they require rigor and time to be properly adapted — you will likely break your site several times trying to apply them yourself, but all the advice is accessible even to users with no technical background.

With the following tips, I was able to push the web performance of the April Moto WordPress site to its limits.

Featured Image Preloading

By using page thumbnails and the get_the_post_thumbnail_image filter, it is possible to preload the main image of the page by adding the following code to your theme's functions.php file (or in a dedicated WordPress plugin).

add\_action('wp\_head', 'pauld\_preload\_main\_image', 11); function pauld\_preload\_main\_image() { if (get\_the\_post\_thumbnail\_url()) { echo ''."\
"; } } 

Optimizing CSS Code

2 native filters are very useful for optimizing performance on WordPress. The first allows loading only the CSS for the Gutenberg blocks that are actually used:

add\_filter('should\_load\_separate\_core\_block\_assets', '\_\_return\_true'); 

By modifying the value of styles_inline_size_limit, it is also possible to force CSS to be delivered as an external file rather than inline code in the page, which would not be cached or optimized by WP Rocket.

add\_filter('styles\_inline\_size\_limit', '\_\_return\_zero'); 

User Resource Optimization

Network bandwidth and the user's device processing power limit a site's performance when over-utilized. To avoid saturating user resources, it is recommended to deliver only the resources strictly necessary for using a web page.

With Perfmatters, I was able to exclude certain resources from pages where they were not being used. For example, the contact form's CSS and JS were being loaded on every page of the site. I also ensured that the resources of a plugin used to format tables in site pages were only loaded on the taxonomy pages where they were actually used.

The Perfmatters extension allows for very fine-grained configuration — it is possible to remove a resource from the entire site, or to do so on a page-by-page basis.

Font Optimization

April Moto was loading fonts from an external domain. This is a bad practice both in terms of web performance and GDPR compliance.

Locally importing the fonts and properly implementing preloading improved the text rendering time by nearly 700ms according to Google PageSpeed — a significant FCP improvement!

Server Configuration Optimization

Server communication is a very important aspect of web performance. April Moto works with a managed hosting provider. Every web performance optimization project includes communication with the client's partners and service providers.

HTTP/2 Protocol Support

HTTP/2 was released in 2014, and the proportion of compatible users is now close to 95%. The main benefit of this network protocol is that it allows downloading multiple files in parallel, unlike HTTP/1 which downloads only one file at a time.

Implementing HTTP/2 boosted April Moto's PageSpeed score from 92 to 99/100.

Deploying the Brotli Compression Algorithm

Brotli is a compression algorithm that speeds up the loading time of the site's resources and text files. Highly efficient, Brotli reduces file sizes by 14 to 21% according to Facebook and Dropbox.

By implementing these 2 simple server-side optimizations, the PageSpeed score jumped by nearly 13 points!

Results of the WordPress Webperf Optimization

With all these optimizations in place, the WordPress webperf optimization of April Moto's site brought the PageSpeed score from 40 to 99, and most importantly resulted in validation of Google's CrUX real-user data 28 days later across all pages of the site.

A few weeks after the optimization, the client came back to ask for advice regarding the addition of a video at the top of their homepage, which had impacted their page score. After a quick analysis, I noticed that the video format could be optimized, but more importantly that no thumbnail had been set on the player via the thumbnail attribute.

These 2 changes made it possible to improve the WordPress site's PageSpeed score and ensure the sustainability of the performance score over time.

An Update 4 Years Later

At the end of 2025, Nicolas decided to call on my services again. The site had evolved: new CDN, new versions of plugins and WordPress, new page templates. April Moto wanted to ensure that all signals were green.

After a new audit, I was able to propose more up-to-date optimizations such as enabling the HTTP/3 protocol or adding speculation rules, as well as optimizing the conversion funnel.

After applying the recommendations, April Moto became the #1 motorcycle insurance provider in France, ahead of competitors such as Maaf, Allianz, and other industry giants.

Based on real user data from people browsing their website:

• 92% of users experienced a page loaded in under 2.5s
• User interactions (clicks, keyboard input, ...) were instantaneous for 95.5% of users

Don't have the knowledge to apply these tips, or want to delegate this optimization work to a web performance expert? Contact me — I'll be happy to assist you with all your WordPress webperf challenges!