Performance Is Not a Checklist

There’s an tendency at times for organizations to treat performance as a checklist of sorts, particularly as we’ve seen the core web vitals metrics bring more attention to performance than ever before. You try to tick the box on those metrics to get them green, then call it a day. (This organization, to their great credit, did not do that.)

But none of that matters if those metrics aren’t painting a complete picture of how users interact with our sites.

Sometimes, it’s just so easy to follow somebody else’s outline for what you should do and check their box, than to actually think about it and decide for yourself — especially if it deviates from their outline.