This started life as a rant on a livestream in 2022. I have rewritten it because the thing that set me off has not gone away, and if anything it has got worse. Back then a client of mine, a merchant running a perfectly healthy store, got an email from an SEO agency. Inside was a single screenshot: a red performance score from a page speed tool. No URL, no explanation of what was tested, no context at all. Just a scary red number and the message, in effect, get your developers to sort this out.

I have been building e-commerce sites for over fifteen years. I have seen that email dozens of times, sent to dozens of business owners, and it nearly always means the same thing. Someone is trying to scare you into a contract.

A score without context means nothing

Here is what that screenshot does not tell you. A page speed score is a snapshot of one page, on one device type, under one set of test conditions. The tools simulate a slow phone on a poor connection by default, which is sensible for engineering work and wildly misleading when shown raw to a business owner. The same page can score 40 on simulated mobile and 95 on desktop in the same minute.

It is also one page. Your homepage score is not your site. It says nothing about your category pages, your product pages, or your checkout, which is where the money actually moves. Anyone presenting a homepage mobile score as the health of your entire site either does not understand the tool or is hoping you don't. I genuinely do not know which is worse.

And there are tricks. Run the test with the cache cleared and aggressive throttling and you can make almost any site look broken. I have watched audits arrive that were clearly produced this way. The person sending them knows exactly what they are doing.

Page speed is not site speed, and neither is revenue

The deeper confusion, and the one that costs small businesses real money, is treating three different things as one: the score in the tool, how fast the site feels to a real customer, and whether the business is converting. They are related. They are not the same.

I have seen stores with mediocre scores convert brilliantly because the products, pricing and trust signals were right. I have seen stores score in the 90s and sell nothing. If an agency draws a straight line from a red number to your revenue problem, they are selling you a story. Speed matters, and I have spent a fair chunk of my career making slow platforms fast, but it is one input among many, not the answer to why sales dipped this quarter.

The glass houses problem

Here is the bit that still makes me laugh. When that email landed in 2022, I ran the same test on the agency's own website. It scored worse than the site they were auditing. That is not a one-off. It is almost a law of nature. The reason is that nobody fully controls a live site. Clients upload huge images, marketing adds tracking scripts, content changes daily. The agency knows this about their own site and conveniently forgets it about yours.

So if you ever receive one of these audits, try it. Put the agency's own domain into the same free tool they used. The result is usually educational.

What to ask instead of panicking

If an SEO company sends you a speed audit, ask these before you spend a penny. Which exact pages were tested, and on what settings? How does that score compare with the two or three competitors I actually lose customers to? Which specific changes do you propose, what will each cost, and what result do you expect from each? And the one that separates professionals from chancers: what evidence is there that speed, rather than anything else, is what is holding this site back?

A good agency, and they do exist, will have answers. They will talk about real user data rather than one lab test, point at specific pages, and be honest about what is worth fixing versus what is noise. The chancers go quiet or get vague, because the red number was the whole pitch.

Devs and SEOs are on the same side, supposedly

I will end where the original rant ended, a little calmer this time. I do not think SEO is nonsense. Technical SEO done properly overlaps heavily with the work I care about: fast, well-structured, server-rendered pages that are easy for both people and crawlers. The sites I build now are static-first partly for that reason, and the speed takes care of itself when the architecture is right.

The problem is not the discipline, it is the sales tactic. Frightening a small business owner with a number they have not been given the tools to understand is not auditing, it is alarmism with a logo on it. Developers and SEO people are meant to be improving the same site for the same client. The good ones already work that way. The rest of you know who you are, and we can see your Lighthouse scores too.