From 35 to 89 —
Core Web Vitals fixed
for a 5‑Star Teak Villa Resort
One of Chiang Mai’s most extraordinary boutique properties was throttled by a 9.2MB hero image, 214 uncompressed photographs, and a decade-old theme. We fixed every metric in 6 days — zero design changes, zero downtime.
Mobile PageSpeed · +54 Points
Every Metric. Fixed.
Villa Mahabhirom
A collection of antique Lanna teak houses — some structures more than 200 years old — carefully reassembled into one of Chiang Mai’s most distinctive boutique stays. The property’s 200+ photographs do the selling; the website is the front desk.
Set beside a lily pond near Chiang Mai’s Old City, Villa Mahabhirom attracts a global audience searching for “luxury villa Chiang Mai” from Tokyo, Sydney, Berlin, and London — often on hotel Wi-Fi most resorts would call unusable. Their site runs WordPress on shared LiteSpeed hosting — a capable stack crippled by zero caching and uncompressed assets.
The OTA leak. On a boutique property with limited inventory, every booking handed to an OTA at 18–25% commission directly cuts the margin that keeps 200-year-old teak standing. And a slow site pushes every undecided guest one click closer to an OTA.
- Client
- Villa Mahabhirom
- Industry
- Boutique Luxury Hospitality
- Location
- Chiang Mai, Thailand
- Platform
- WordPress + LiteSpeed
- Property
- 14 antique teak villas
- Timeline
- 6 Days
- Result
- 35 → 89 · CWV Pass
A 200-Year-Old Property.
A 2005-Grade website.
When we ran an independent PageSpeed audit, the mobile results told the story: a photography-first property was being buried by its own photography — and three third-party embeds finishing its visitors off.
| Metric | Score | Google Target | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Performance Score | 35 / 100 | 90+ | Failing |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 5.8 seconds | ≤ 2.5s | Critical |
| Total Blocking Time | 610 ms | ≤ 200ms | Critical |
| Cumulative Layout Shift | 0.412 | ≤ 0.1 | Poor |
| Speed Index | 9.8 seconds | ≤ 3.4s | Critical |
| Core Web Vitals | FAILED | Pass | Failed |
Audited with Google PageSpeed Insights · Lighthouse · Chrome UX Report (CrUX)
5 Root Causes.
All fixable.
-
Root Cause of LCP 5.8s9.2MB DSLR Hero Image — No Compression, No WebP
The hero photograph was uploaded straight from the photographer’s export folder — full-resolution JPEG, no compression, no preload, no modern format. On hotel Wi-Fi abroad, guests waited nearly six seconds for the first pixel of the property to appear.
LCP 5.8s · limit ≤ 2.5s -
Root Cause of CLS 0.412Masonry Gallery Grid Without Image Dimensions
The teak villa gallery loaded as a pure masonry grid with no width or height attributes anywhere. As photographs arrived in random order, the layout reflowed visibly — the page literally jumped under visitors’ thumbs as they tapped the booking button.
CLS 0.412 · limit ≤ 0.1 -
Root Cause of TBT 610msGoogle Maps, TripAdvisor & Booking Iframes Blocking Load
Three heavyweight third-party embeds executed synchronously on every page view: a full interactive Google Map (2.4MB, loaded even by guests who never scrolled to Location), a TripAdvisor badge widget, and the booking engine iframe — together monopolising the main thread for over half a second.
TBT 610ms · limit ≤ 200ms -
Root Cause of FCP 3.1s7 Google Font Weights + Legacy Theme CSS Render-Blocking
The theme requested seven font weights (only three were ever rendered) plus its full legacy stylesheet before any text could paint. No font-display: swap, no critical CSS — guests on slow connections stared at a blank white screen for three seconds.
FCP 3.1s · limit ≤ 1.8s -
Root Cause of Speed Index 9.8sNo Caching Layer — PHP Rendering Every Request Live
The site ran PHP 7.4 with no page cache, no OPcache, no object cache: every hit rebuilt the HTML from scratch. Time To First Byte alone averaged 2.2 seconds for international visitors — before a single asset even began downloading.
SI 9.8s · limit ≤ 3.4s
6 Days. Zero Design Changes.
Zero downtime.
Every fix was implemented at the server and code level. The century-old aesthetic — the fonts, the photography, the layout — stayed exactly as the owners intended.
- Full technical audit — Lighthouse, WebPageTest (Mumbai + Frankfurt + Tokyo nodes)
- Staging environment configured (zero risk to live site)
- 214 images batch-converted to WebP, resized to display dimensions — hero 9.2MB → 380KB
- Explicit width & height added to every gallery image (CLS fix)
- LCP hero preloaded with
<link rel="preload">on key templates
- Critical CSS generated for header, hero and above-fold layout
- Google Fonts subset: 7 weights → 3, self-hosted with font-display: swap
- PHP upgraded 7.4 → 8.2 with OPcache enabled
- LiteSpeed Cache configured — full-page cache with booking/availability exclusions
- Object cache enabled; autoloaded wp_options trimmed from 11MB to 1.4MB
- Click-to-load facade for Google Maps — 40KB static preview replaces the 2.4MB embed
- TripAdvisor widget deferred to browser idle time
- Booking engine iframe lazy-loaded and connected asynchronously
- GA4 and Meta Pixel loaded only after first interaction
- 2 unused plugin scripts loading globally on every page removed
- All fixes validated on staging — mobile throttling + real-device testing
- Core Web Vitals pass confirmed via PageSpeed Insights + CrUX field data
- Deployed to live with zero downtime
- Full before/after report with PageSpeed screenshots delivered
- Cache-warm automation configured so every visitor hits a cached page
Before vs. After — full comparison.
Drag the gold handle to compare the live PageSpeed audits, pixel for pixel.
Mobile
CWV Passed
-
Largest Contentful Paint
1.9 s -
Total Blocking Time
140 ms -
Cumulative Layout Shift
0.05 -
Speed Index
2.8 s -
First Contentful Paint
0.8 s
Core Web Vitals Assessment: Passed — all metrics in the good range
Mobile
CWV Failed
-
Largest Contentful Paint
5.8 s -
Total Blocking Time
610 ms -
Cumulative Layout Shift
0.412 -
Speed Index
9.8 s -
First Contentful Paint
3.1 s
Core Web Vitals Assessment: Failed — multiple URLs need improvement
| Metric | Before | After | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Performance Score | 35 / 100 | 89 / 100 | +54 Points |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 5.8 seconds | 1.9 seconds | −67% Faster |
| Total Blocking Time | 610 ms | 140 ms | −77% Reduced |
| Cumulative Layout Shift | 0.412 | 0.05 | −87.9% Stable |
| Speed Index | 9.8 seconds | 2.8 seconds | −71% Faster |
| Core Web Vitals | FAILED | PASSED | Google Approved |
What This Means in
Real Booking Terms
With CWV passing, Villa Mahabhirom competes for “luxury villa Chiang Mai” on merit again — queries with enormous booking intent and, crucially, zero OTA commission attached to them.
CWV = ranking signal
214 photographs are this property’s entire sales team. At 1.9s LCP, the candlelit teak pool villa appears in under two seconds — on a train in Tokyo or a sofa in Sydney, on middle-of-nowhere hotel Wi-Fi.
+20% Δ conversion / second
CLS of 0.05 means no more jumping text or shifting booking buttons under guests’ thumbs. The digital stillness finally matches the property at dusk — and premium conversion lives in exactly those details.
0.05 CLS — pixel-stable
A fast, trustworthy direct site converts more bookings in-house. Every 10% shift from OTA to direct keeps 18–25% per night in the property’s pocket — compounding, forever, with no additional ad spend.
18–25% commission saved
In Their Own Words
“Hafiz and team has helped me get my site back to loading quickly. We went massive pagespeed score also from a score of an F to an A on the GTMetrix scale that measures a website’s loading time and quality. This helps tremendously to keep our clients coming back! We appreciate that Hafiz and his team are always ready and available to help with all of our needs, including fixing bugs and site attacks as they come up. Hafiz has been communicative and professional and has delivered on every account. We recommend Hafiz for all of your site-based needs.”
Services Used in This Project
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