WooCommerce LearnDash Performance Case Study
Took a plugin-heavy WooCommerce + LearnDash store from 22.5 to 94 on mobile and 52 to 96 on desktop — without breaking a single cart, checkout, quiz, or logged-in session. The hard part wasn’t raw speed; it was reaching it on a live stack (Cloudflare, Hummingbird, Smush, Perfmatters) where blunt optimization would have taken down payments and course logic.
Result
- Mobile average: 22.5 to 94
- Desktop average: 52 to 96
- Measured across the homepage, course and product pages, category and content pages, and a knowledge-base article
The constraint
The site relied on early scripts and context-sensitive behavior, so blunt optimization would have broken payments, quizzes, or account state. The real task was separating aggressive public-page optimization from the sensitive logged-in, cart, and checkout paths.
What the work involved
- Cloudflare review plus cache and allowlist adjustments for the optimization stack
- Hummingbird delay settings, Critical CSS generation, and safe font-swap tuning
- Smush lazyload exclusions, critical image preload, and LCP fetch-priority tuning
- A scoped MU-plugin to disable optimization features for logged-in, cart, and checkout contexts
- Delay-JS exclusions for critical WooCommerce, course, review, menu, and third-party scripts
- CSS and mobile-menu fixes to preserve behavior after delayed JavaScript changes
Client details are anonymized; the results and technical approach come from documented work.