Seven avatars from one SVG symbol, each with its own animation. The CSS cascade dies at the Shadow DOM, but custom properties pass straight through it, which is how one symbol ends up blinking and tapping at a different rate per instance.
A client dropped 8MB 4K PNGs into the media library for holiday backgrounds and the LCP went red within the hour. Here is what fixed it: a 200KB cap on hero images, one file per breakpoint, and WebP.
A fleet dashboard flashed so hard that a broken-down truck went unnoticed for twenty minutes. Faster polling made it worse. What helped: delta indicators, sparklines, skeleton screens, an honest last-sync label and ARIA live regions.
Trimming a legacy site cut page weights by 80%, and the same work cut its energy use. Five steps: pick one journey, benchmark it, set a page weight target, strip the WordPress junk nobody needs, then keep checking.
A hero illustration that looked right at 16:9 and collapsed on mobile. Instead of shipping two SVG files, I moved the artwork into a hidden symbol library and referenced it from two wrappers with different viewBox values, then animated the use elements.
A client handed me an MVP he had built over a weekend in Cursor. It looked polished until I tried to add one calculation and found no schema underneath any of it. This is the case for settling the data model before you open a coding assistant.
A client once sent me a 50-page persona PDF that said nothing about why people abandon checkout. Functional personas built with AI from support tickets and order notes tell you what a customer is trying to finish and where they stop.
I spent three hours hand-coding cubic-bezier keyframes for a WooCommerce build and the bounce still felt stiff. A spring-based SVG animation workflow with SMIL exports got it right and kept the animation inside the asset.
A client was shipping a 4MB transparent PNG for every header to get a 1950s cartoon look, which killed load time and left the page with no real headings. Layered text-shadows, paint-order and a small jiggle animation do the same job in CSS.
A $5M WooCommerce store shrugged off a 40% checkout drop-off until I stopped showing percentages and started showing session recordings and validation logs. The board approved the fix in ten minutes.