Website performance is not just a technical problem. It is a growth problem.
Most people still think performance means speed scores, green Lighthouse circles, or making developers happy. Richard's view: performance is where engineering, SEO, trust and revenue meet.
20+ years
Engineering experience
5+ years
Performance advisory work
Biggest companies
Real-world app performance
Richard has spent over 20 years as an engineer building and improving software products. For more than 5 of those years, he advised some of the biggest companies in the world on how to improve the performance of their applications.
The pattern was always the same: performance was never just a dev issue. It was a business issue hiding inside the frontend.
When a page loads slowly, users leave. When a layout jumps around, trust drops. When a site feels sluggish, conversion suffers. And when search engines crawl a slow or unstable experience, discoverability suffers too.
Why performance matters for SEO
Search engines prioritise user experience because users do. A page that loads fast, becomes usable quickly and stays visually stable gives search engines stronger evidence that the result is worth sending traffic to.
That does not mean one Lighthouse score magically decides where a site ranks. SEO is more complicated than that. But performance affects the signals that sit around ranking: crawl efficiency, bounce behaviour, time on site, engagement and the user's willingness to keep moving through the journey.
The metrics are not vanity numbers
Core Web Vitals are useful because they translate engineering work into user experience. Largest Contentful Paint tells you whether the important content arrived quickly. Interaction to Next Paint tells you whether the page feels responsive. Cumulative Layout Shift tells you whether the page feels stable.
These metrics matter because they map to real user frustration. They are not perfect, but they are directionally right. Slow, unstable and unresponsive websites lose trust before the copy even gets a chance to persuade.
How performance quality compounds
Better performance improves the whole user journey
Search visibility
Fast, stable pages are easier for search engines to crawl, render and trust.
User engagement
People stay longer when pages load quickly and respond smoothly.
Conversion confidence
A site that feels solid makes the business behind it feel more credible.
LCP
Largest Contentful Paint
How quickly the main content appears. If the page feels blank or slow, users and crawlers both get a weaker experience.
Good: under 2.5s
INP
Interaction to Next Paint
How responsive the site feels after the user clicks, taps or types.
Good: under 200ms
CLS
Cumulative Layout Shift
Whether the layout jumps around while loading. Instability kills confidence fast.
Good: under 0.1
TTI
Time to Interactive
Whether the page is actually usable, not just visually present.
Measure, prioritise, improve
Tools help, but judgement matters
Lighthouse is a good starting point. It tells you where to look. But it does not always tell you what matters most for the business, what to fix first, or what is merely technical noise.
PageLens AI is designed to bring that judgement into the audit. It looks at performance alongside SEO, accessibility, content, tracking, security, trust signals and real page evidence. The goal is not to produce a prettier scorecard. The goal is to show what is getting in the way of users, search engines and conversion.
The practical takeaway
Website performance is not just about shaving milliseconds off a load time. It is about giving users confidence, giving search engines a better experience to index, and giving your business the best chance to convert the traffic it already earns.
Richard has spent decades seeing what good looks like. PageLens brings that experience to every website.
Want Richard's lens on your own site?
Run a PageLens scan to see where performance, SEO and user experience are helping your growth, and where they are quietly holding it back.