As someone who´s learning HTML, CSS, and JS mainly to be able to improve a site´s page loading speed having a guide, roadmap or any sort of advice what would be the best way to approach learning will be very helpful.
And I am not referring to just installing WP Rocket (or any other WP performance plugin) but to look at a GTMetrix or a Google PageSpeed Insights report and knowing that to "tweak" or optimize.
Cheers!
If total control you want, and no Bloat, hand crafted HTML, CSS, JS, PHP is all you need.
To get the best on wordpress, start by the core, Server SDD or better, Nginx or litespeed, litespeed is best... then editing the CSS, JS of plugins and themes, keeping the fonts low, optimizing the images and request.
In wordpress this isn't easy.
Long ago i dedicated a whole day to running tests, picking the right cache plugin, optimizing the files, making my own theme etc.... i got great performance, but none compared to hand crafted site.
I also tried Oxygen builder, i was able to get, on Google, Gmatrix etc... 100 to 98.
when adding forms, since Oxygen doesn't have forms built in, the speed went down, it compared to Elementor, same speeds.
Elementor is fast, if you only use Elementor and Pro. nothing more. and if you optimize fonts and images.
But once you start adding Plugins, speed suffers.
To sum it all.... You are on the right pad, however, Wordpress is a bit of work when trying to optimize, and the results are, questionable. Good luck.
And, i would also like to see, how others approach the speed issue, what they recommend and have done.
