Website performance is often treated as a trade-off: keep the design and functionality you want, or strip everything back to make the site fast. Our recent work on christiankrauter.com shows that it does not have to be that way. The result was a 98 mobile PageSpeed score, with perfect 100 scores for Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO, plus 2/2 for Agentic Browsing.

How we achieved a 98 mobile PageSpeed score

The improvement did not come from one magic switch. We reduced the amount of unnecessary work the browser had to do. Heavy third-party audio code was removed from the initial page load and replaced with a purpose-built, lightweight WordPress player block that loads SoundCloud only when a visitor presses Play. Images were made responsive and appropriately sized, duplicate or unnecessary assets were removed, and caching was configured for the site’s Nginx environment.

Human creativity, AI execution

This was also a strong example of practical human-and-AI collaboration. Christian Krauter set the goals, tested the experience and made the creative decisions. Nova, an OpenAI Codex coding agent, audited the implementation, built the custom WordPress components, applied the changes and checked the live result after every step. The work stayed focused on real user experience rather than chasing a score in isolation.

The result

The final mobile test, run on an emulated Moto G Power over Slow 4G, recorded a 1.7-second First Contentful Paint, 2.1-second Largest Contentful Paint, 0 ms Total Blocking Time and a 0.007 Cumulative Layout Shift. Those numbers show that a media-rich WordPress website can remain attractive, functional and exceptionally fast when every asset earns its place.

Great performance is not only about Lighthouse. It supports usability, accessibility, search visibility and the ability of both people and AI agents to understand and navigate a website. This result is proof that careful optimisation, custom development and AI-assisted execution can produce something genuinely excellent.