Notes from real builds
Findings from actual client work — what was measured, what turned out to be a false alarm, and what I’d do differently. No listicles, no filler.
Elementor 4.3 ignores flex-shrink: 0
A timeline column collapsed to 45px on phones and turned the circles into ovals. flex-shrink was set and saved — it just never reached the CSS. Plus the WP Rocket setting that quietly ate a scroll animation.
Read the article- Core Web Vitals
Lighthouse never touches your page
Delay JavaScript holds a script until the visitor interacts. Lighthouse never interacts — so delayed scripts are not measured as fast, they are not measured at all. Which part of your score is real?
- Tracking & attribution
Your tracking pixel is switched on. It is not firing.
WP Rocket's Delay JavaScript waits for a mousemove, tap or scroll before running a script. A visitor who lands from an ad and bounces does none of those — so the pixel never fires, and the sessions you lose are exactly the ones you paid for.
- WordPress performance
Delay JavaScript Safe Mode does almost nothing on an Elementor site
WP Rocket says Delay JavaScript is on. On the served HTML, one script was delayed and thirty-six were not — because Safe Mode excludes jQuery, and Elementor is built on jQuery.