A solo tax practitioner site was scoring PSI mobile performance 74 with LCP 5.2 seconds and CLS 0.135 on the highest-traffic blog post. The brand is solid, the content is solid, but Google ranking signal was getting pulled down by render-path issues that took 90 minutes to find and fix. Here is exactly what was wrong and exactly what we did.
Short answer: The hero H1 was being hidden by a GSAP opacity: 0 entrance animation, pushing LCP to the moment the animation completed. The blog CLS was font-swap reflow on web fonts loaded without metric overrides. Three external CDN scripts were adding round-trips that did not need to exist. Four small changes; PSI 74 -> 91, LCP 5.2s -> 3.16s, CLS 0.135 -> 0.000.
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