If you’ve been on neilmatthews.com in the last few days, you might have noticed it looks different. It’s running on a new theme, and it’s one I built myself.
Here’s why I did it, how I built it, and what Google’s speed test says about it, including the bits that aren’t perfect yet.
What I wanted from it
I had three goals.
Make it unique. For a long time my site ran on Astra with Elementor on top. That’s a sensible setup, and a lot of good WordPress sites are built that way. But it meant my site looked a bit like plenty of other sites. I wanted something that was mine.
Lose the weight. Astra and Elementor are good tools. I’ve built client sites with Elementor and written about how I use it on WooCommerce product pages. They’re built to do lots of jobs for lots of different people, and that flexibility carries some weight. My site is a blog, a few service pages, testimonials, case studies and a way to book a call. I didn’t need most of what they offer, so I didn’t want to carry it.
Make it as fast as I could. I spend a lot of my working life telling shop owners that speed matters. It was about time my own site practised what I preach.
How I built it
I vibe coded it. That’s the slightly daft name for building software with an AI coding assistant: you describe what you want, the AI writes the code, and you review it, test it and steer it. I use Cursor for this, and these days I use it heavily in my coding work.
That doesn’t mean the AI did the job on its own. I decided what went in, read what it wrote, threw out what I didn’t like and tested it. What it changed was how realistic a custom theme felt for my own site. It stopped being a someday project. Building and tweaking it took me roughly five hours over a weekend.
The scores
I ran the homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights on the morning of 19 October. You can see the full report here.
On mobile (Google simulates a mid-range phone, a Moto G Power, on a slow 4G connection):
- Performance 99
- Accessibility 100
- Best Practices 100
- SEO 100
On desktop:
- Performance 100
- Accessibility 96
- Best Practices 100
- SEO 100
The timings behind those numbers:
- First Contentful Paint: 0.9 seconds on mobile, 0.3 on desktop. That’s when something first appears on screen.
- Largest Contentful Paint: 1.4 seconds on mobile, 0.3 on desktop. That’s when the main content has loaded.
- Total Blocking Time: 0 ms on both. The browser isn’t stuck running code while the page loads.
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0 on both. Nothing jumps around while you’re trying to read or tap.
- Speed Index: 3.7 seconds on mobile, 0.6 on desktop.
What isn’t perfect yet
It isn’t 100 across the board, and I’d rather say so. Mobile performance is 99, and the mobile Speed Index of 3.7 seconds is the number I’d most like to bring down. Desktop accessibility is 96, because a few buttons and links sit too close together to tap easily. That fix is on my list.
Update, 19 October: I vibe coded fixes for both the same morning. The touch-target warning has gone, and the Speed Index on mobile is down from 3.7 to 2.2 seconds. Google PageSpeed Insights now scores the site 100 for Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO, on both mobile and desktop. See the updated PageSpeed report.
These are also lab results from Google’s test, not measurements from real visitors. There’s no real-visitor data in the report yet, so I’ll keep an eye on how that looks once it builds up.
For what it’s worth, I used the same approach on a recent build, Strideora, and it scored 100 on all four on mobile. So this isn’t a one-off.
What this means for your shop
I’m not saying everyone should rip out their page builder tomorrow. If Elementor lets you change your own pages without waiting for a developer, that’s worth a lot. Page builders have real pros as well as cons.
But speed matters more on a shop than almost anywhere else, because a slow product page or checkout costs you sales. If your shop feels sluggish, it’s worth asking a few plain questions:
- Are you using most of what your theme and page builder load, or just a small part of it?
- Do you edit your pages often enough to need drag and drop?
- Have you tried adding speed plugins and found the site no quicker?
Sometimes the answer is a lighter setup. Often it’s simply taking things out rather than adding more. Either way, it starts with looking at what your site is actually doing.
If your WooCommerce or WordPress site is slow and you’d like a second pair of eyes, book a quick call with me. We’ll look at what’s slowing it down and what I’d change first.
Written by Connie, an AI, from Neil Matthews’ notes, archive, and direction. Neil directed and edited this piece. He did not write these words. Augmented publishing by Neil Matthews.