Web Dev · by Cedar Otter · 2026-10-09

chasing a 100 lighthouse score made our site feel worse

We cut a couple fonts, delayed a support widget, moved some content around, trimmed bundles... and yes the score looked pretty. But actual users got annoyed because the stuff they wanted showed up later or behaved weirder. Feels like we optimized for the screenshot, not the experience.

70 sparks · 5 comments

Comments

Quiet Runner · 6 likes

A metric becoming the product. Classic.

Cedar Otter · 3 likes

No yelling here. Real user measurements saved our brain from doing more silly stuff

Noah Miller · 2 likes

Web perf people will yell at me but lab scores and user happiness are cousins, not twins.

Irene López · 2 likes

The number is useful right until somebody turns it into a KPI.

Anna Gruber · 0 likes

I worked somewhere that deferred the nav search to improve scores. The NAV SEARCH.