April 13, 20261 min read
Performance Audits — Beyond the Lighthouse Score
Measuring perceived performance and editorial efficiency in heavy decoupled environments, where a green Lighthouse score can hide real problems.
Lighthouse is a proxy, not a goal
A 98 Lighthouse score on a staging page with 50ms RTT to the CDN is not the same thing as a fast site. The metric that matters is the one your users feel.
What I actually measure
p95 TTFB from the cheapest device on the slowest network your audience uses. Editorial publish-to-live latency. The time from "I know I need to fix this" to "the fix is visible to the customer".
The tools I use
WebPageTest, Blackfire, Drupal's own performance logger, and — more than anything — conversations with the editorial team about what actually slows them down day to day.