The Angstadtarms ecommerce had almost perfect Lighthouse scores but has struggled with Core Web Vitals. What might be the issue here?
I discovered they were using an cheating speed plugin. This plugin fakes the score with a known LCP hacking that still works on Lighthouse by creating an invisible element with the necessary dimensions to pass as a LCP candidate.
The plugin add the code once you enable an feature called “early paint”;
To avoid potential disruption and banning from the Wordpress .org plugin repository they were smart enough to only offer this feature on a ‘premium’ edition outside of wp.org.
This plugin is used in +40k sites.
As for the client website, we removed the plugin(he was kind of disappointed the score went down) but managed to easily pass the CWV.
