Let’s be honest from the start: if you have a website for an accounting firm, a psychologist, a real estate agency, a barbershop, a clinic, an office, or any other common local business, it’s very unlikely that someone is opening your site with a stopwatch in hand thinking:
“Wow, it loaded in 1.8s instead of 1.2s.”
That’s simply not how most decisions are made in the real world.
The myth the dev bubble helped create
(And at some point, I was part of it too.)
Inside the developer bubble, it often feels like a PageSpeed score below 90 is a serious mistake, Lighthouse not fully green is a sign of negligence, and a CLS above 0.1 is almost an architectural sin. But outside that bubble — where businesses need to generate leads and pay bills — the logic tends to be far more pragmatic.
Clients want to show up on Google, be found on Maps, inspire trust, and be able to contact someone without friction. They don’t know what LCP is, they don’t care about TBT (not the old Twitter one, the other), and they’re very unlikely to reject a service because a PageSpeed score is 78 instead of 95.
And that doesn’t make them wrong — just human.
So… does PageSpeed matter?
Yes, it does. A lot. But not in the same way for every context.
There’s a massive difference between a truly slow website — heavy, janky, taking 5, 6, 8 seconds to show anything — and a well-built site sitting around a 65–80 score, loading fast enough to deliver a solid experience.
Beyond that point, gains still exist, but they stop being transformational and become incremental. Going from 40 to 70 completely changes user perception. Going from 70 to 95 improves important details, but rarely redefines the outcome of a local business on its own.
“But what about SEO?”
Yes, speed is a ranking factor. That’s a fact. But it’s also not the dominant factor in most scenarios.
In practice — especially for common websites — content quality, well-executed local SEO, clarity of the offer, authority, and reviews carry far more weight. Speed works as a strong reinforcement — often as a tie-breaker — but rarely as a miracle solution on its own.
A PageSpeed score of 98 helps, improves experience, and reduces friction. It just doesn’t compensate for weak content or a confusing value proposition.
The point almost no one puts on the table
Chasing very high scores usually involves real technical decisions: reducing animations, revisiting aesthetics, changing rendering strategies, moving to SSG/ISR, optimizing builds, reviewing dependencies. All of that has a cost — in time, complexity, and architectural trade-offs.
For many common websites, the most visible return from these optimizations appears when there is volume: meaningful traffic, many sessions, many conversions, or more complex digital products. Outside of that, the gains exist, but they’re more subtle and cumulative.
This isn’t being anti-performance. It’s understanding technical proportion. Architecture is also about knowing how far it makes sense to go.
The right question isn’t “what’s the score?”
The right question is:
“Does my site load fast enough to deliver a good experience and not push people away?”
If the answer is yes, you’ve already solved most of the problem. Everything else becomes refinement.
A quick preview of the next post
Before anyone assumes this is just opinion, a future post will continue this discussion and dive into the data: real studies, Core Web Vitals, field metrics, large companies, and concrete impacts on conversion and business. No empty lab tests — just numbers from people who actually gained or lost money because of performance.
Now I want to hear from you: have you ever seen a client complain about speed? Lost a project because of a score? Felt a real difference after improving performance?
Let’s talk about real life — with less dogma and more context.