Speed won’t save a page nobody needs
Core Web Vitals count in Google ranking, but relevance comes first. Fix slow pages; skip the perfect score.
Some founders spend a week shaving milliseconds off a page that answers nothing anyone searches for. Others ignore speed entirely while their signup page loads like it’s on hotel Wi-Fi. Google’s own page experience documentation lands right between them.
It confirms that Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems and recommends getting them into good shape. But it also says Google always aims to show the most relevant content, even when the page experience is mediocre, and that good scores don’t guarantee top rankings. Where it can help is when lots of helpful pages compete for the same query. Google even says chasing a perfect score just for SEO may not be the best use of your time, and that page experience aspects beyond Core Web Vitals don’t directly help you rank, though they do make a site nicer to use.
So the order is: be the most useful answer, make sure your key pages pass Core Web Vitals, then go back to being useful. Speed is the tiebreaker, not the trophy.
The example
- Instead of
- “Spending launch week pushing Lighthouse from 92 to 100 on a blog post nobody searches for”
- Try
- “Fixing the slow hero image on your pricing page, then writing the comparison post people actually search for”
Before you flush
Run your signup page through PageSpeed Insights and fix the single worst issue it flags. Then go improve the content.