Fewer Layers, More Control: A WordPress SEO and CLS Case Study

Targeted fixes beat a rebuild. On a notarial office site running WordPress with Divi, desktop CLS dropped from 0.106 to 0.000261 and the Lighthouse performance score rose from 86 to 91. No new plugin was installed.

The site serves a notarial office in Bielany Wrocławskie, near Wrocław. We diagnosed problems, proposed changes and patched code. The client kept editorial control over titles, descriptions and menu labels.

Independent check in PageSpeed Insights

A PageSpeed Insights run on the same day scored 92 on desktop and 68 on mobile, with SEO and best practices at 100. Desktop confirms the local measurement. Mobile stays the open item.

Where the shift came from

All 15 reported shifts involved the navigation. The mechanism was specific:

• after window.load, Divi added header padding based on logo width;
• transition: all animated that geometry change;
• the menu wrapped and the header grew from 80 to 127 pixels;
• the percentage-sized logo scaled up with the header.

A stable Flexbox layout, a controlled logo size and no post-load displacement removed the shifts. The sticky header, web fonts and animations stayed in place.

Headings that keep the design

The homepage H1 was the Latin motto “Lex est, quod notamus.” and the office name was an ordinary subtitle. We swapped the semantics: the name became H1, the motto became H2, with its color, font and size unchanged. Browser checks confirmed identical appearance.

Interior headings remain under Divi and database control. Temporary PHP overrides were removed.

Metadata without another plugin

Divi already exposes SEO fields. The homepage uses its own section, while interior pages read the WordPress custom fields seo_title and seo_description, which appear only after enabling the Custom Fields panel. The original homepage title ended with a stray separator, because Divi joined the site name with an empty tagline. Our title, description and heading checklist describes the rules applied here.

What stays open

• The Ukrainian homepage still emits a Polish title and two descriptions from two sources.
• Mobile LCP and contact-page map shifts need separate work.
• Three fonts, roughly 250 kB, still serve a small icon set.
• No data links this work to rankings, traffic or inquiries.

The cost of layers

A builder stack turns small edits into template, database and shortcode work. For a handful of informational pages, content files and prebuilt HTML are easier to diff, version and verify, and canonical and language signals are simpler to control there too. Agentic AI shifts that calculation further: it reads the report, locates the code, prepares a patch and verifies the result in a browser.

This site was not migrated; the work ran on its existing WordPress installation. A score of 91 is not the ceiling, and WordPress alone does not set one.