BionicWP Achieves 88% Core Web Vitals Pass Rate for 2000+ Websites

“Come for the speed. Stay for the support.”

That’s BionicWP’s slogan and value proposition which allows them to attract hundreds of customers month after month. 

BionicWP offers a truly managed WordPress platform for freelancers, businesses, agencies, and super-heroes. They combine everything a website owner might need in one solution – updates, security, backups, and speed optimization. Their customer support also carries a reputation for being outstanding. Their approach to going above and beyond for server support has been a catalyst for growth since their launch in 2020.

During our latest conversations to build this case study, they shared some hot news from the kitchen. They are preparing to launch a white label version of their platform that should make it even easier for agency owners to offer hosting services to their clients. You can find more about their hosting options here.

And while they work hard on ensuring that the second part of their slogan is true, they rely on NitroPack for speed:

Today, almost 18 months later, NitroPack is optimizing more than 2000 BionicWP websites, helping them pass their Core Web Vitals and guaranteeing exceptional user experience to their visitors. 

In this case study, we’ll look at the before and after BionicWP’s clients' websites and how NitroPack helps them to skyrocket their results.
 

High Passed Core Web Vitals Rate and Drastic Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) Improvements with NitroPack

Because it would be a lot of work to go site by site to generate the overall CWV report, we’re going to use our own Telemetry report, which utilizes the web-vitals library. 

The results for the last 30 days are as follows:

Without NitroPack, only 31.74% of all websites pass their Core Web Vitals. For comparison, 88.14% of all websites pass their CWV with NitroPack enabled. 

When it comes to Largest Contentful Paint, the difference is even bigger. Only 32.81% of all websites have a “good” LCP score without NitroPack. In contrast, when NitroPack is enabled, the percentage jumps to 93.41%. 

We’ve recently written about how hard it is for website owners to achieve a good LCP score. As a matter of fact, only 56.5% of all sites meet the “good” LCP threshold, compared to much higher rates for First Input Delay (94.7%) and Cumulative Layout Shift (71.7%), according to the latest Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX). 

The truth is that there are a lot of moving parts to optimize a site’s LCP, but NitroPack seems to have all the right ingredients for getting the job done. 

And as it turns out, BionicWP’s clients love that as well:

Here’s what NitroPack does to achieve these spectacular results.

NitroPack’s LCP Optimization Techniques

Website owners have a hard time optimizing their LCP score because numerous optimizations need to be applied — something the traditional site speed plugins cannot offer.

Thankfully, as an all-in-one site speed optimization service, NitroPack can easily offer that. 

As Philip Walton mentioned in his recent video, the LCP optimization process can be divided into four parts, with each part requiring different techniques:

1. Ensure the LCP resource starts loading as early as possible.
2. Ensure the LCP element can render as soon as its resource finishes loading.
3. Reduce the load time of the LCP resource as much as you can without sacrificing quality.
4. Deliver the initial HTML document as fast as possible.

Firstly, to eliminate any resource delay, NitroPack preloads the LCP element to ensure it will start loading as early as possible.

Secondly, we need to ensure that after the LCP resource finishes loading, nothing prevents it from rendering it right away. That could be render-blocking resources like CSS and JavaScript files. 

NitroPack applies a ton of optimizations automatically like:

• Generating Critical CSS for every page;
• Reducing unused CSS rules;
• Lazy loading JavaScript until user interaction. 

Next, we need to optimize the LCP resource itself. Here NitroPack’s complete image optimization stack comes in handy. Our service uses lossy compression to reduce image file size. It also converts all images into WebP format and applies preemptive image sizing to ensure images fit their containers perfectly.

Last but not least, to guarantee BionicWP’s clients good LCP, we need to reduce the Time to First Byte (TTFB). 

TTFB measures how long the visitor waits to receive the first byte of data from the server. A slow TTFB leads to visitors staring at a blank screen, which increases the chance for them to bounce. 

Here, NitroPack’s advanced caching mechanism reduces TTFB and improves performance in general. On top of that, all BionicWP clients take advantage of our built-in CDN, which is provided by Cloudflare. This means their content is served through servers in 270 cities in 100+ countries around the world.

Consistent Performance for Results Beyond The Testing Lab

Our mission is to allow our clients to achieve performance results that they only dreamt of. However, that’s not enough for us. We strive to provide them with consistent results so they can be sure that what they get today is what they will get in the future as well.