The WordPress Performance Profiling Toolkit We Actually Use
Not a plugin roundup. Four tools that actually found something on a real WordPress VIP network, what each one is blind to, and which symptom sends you to which one.
debugging
You Can’t Eyeball a Geometry Library
Three libraries offered the same outline-offset operation. Two were secretly the same algorithm and one quietly drifted — and the only way to tell was a diff, because looking at the shapes told me nothing.
The LCP Element That Wasn’t Content
Weeks of hero-image optimization went nowhere, because the thing Lighthouse was actually measuring wasn’t the hero image at all — it was a cookie banner’s logo.
One Bot Request Poisoned Our Cache — And Every Real Visitor Got the Broken Page
Ads were randomly missing on one site, with no reproducible pattern anyone could find. The cause was a single automated request with the wrong Accept header, cached and served to everyone after it.