Lazy loading that made everything slower
I had a week where my Core Web Vitals looked like a slow-motion car crash.
New layout. New images. New lazy loading strategy I felt pretty smart about. Lighthouse loved it locally. Then the real-world data arrived.
Chrome UX Report came back with my LCP in the 3.4s to 3.7s range on mobile for some key pages. Before the redesign I was sitting around 2.1s to 2.4s. So I “optimized” and lost over a full second of LCP.
The culprit was not big JavaScript. It was not fonts. It was me getting too aggressive with loading="lazy".
