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.

Performance, like accessibility, is not about conformance.

It’s not about a checklist.

It’s not even about simply making things fast.

It’s about providing a better experience for the people using our sites and applications to make sure they can efficiently accomplish their goals. Doing that requires that we pay close attention to what those goals are, how they are trying to achieve them, and then making sure that the way we measure performance matches up.