Every hour spent chasing a perfect PageSpeed score is an hour taken from SEO work that could move the needle. That is the opportunity-cost argument at the heart of a new Search Engine Land piece, and it challenges one of the most persistent habits in technical SEO.
The piece argues that every hour spent chasing a perfect PageSpeed score is an hour taken from SEO work that could move the needle, and it covers where to focus instead. The point is not that speed does not matter, but that perfection has a price measured in the other work it displaces. A team has finite hours, and the last stretch toward a perfect score is often the most expensive stretch of all.
That framing reframes a familiar debate. Instead of asking whether a site is fast enough in the abstract, it asks what else the same hours could have bought: a better article, a stronger page, a fixed technical problem, or a link that brings real traffic. When the comparison is that concrete, perfect scores often lose.
The logic of diminishing returns applies here as clearly as anywhere in SEO. The first improvements to a slow site are usually the most valuable, because they fix problems visitors actually feel. Later improvements, the ones that push a good score toward a perfect one, tend to be smaller, harder, and less noticeable to real users, even as they consume more specialist time.
This is where teams get stuck. A score is visible, measurable, and satisfying to improve, which makes it tempting to keep polishing long after the user benefit has levelled off. The dashboard rewards the chase, but rankings and revenue reward the work that was postponed to fund it.
The piece points toward work with a clearer line to results: content that answers what searchers actually want, links that bring authority and referral traffic, and technical fixes that remove real barriers to crawling, indexing, or rendering. Those categories are less tidy than a single score, but they are where rankings are usually won or lost.
A useful test is to ask what changes for a visitor. A new article gives them something they did not have. A fixed technical fault lets them reach a page they could not reach. A perfect score on an already fast page changes very little for them, however good it looks in a report.
None of this is an argument for ignoring speed. A genuinely slow site frustrates visitors, loses conversions, and creates problems no amount of content can fix. The argument is about the endpoint: getting a slow site to a good, competitive speed is high-value work, while grinding a good site toward perfection is where the waste creeps in.
The distinction is between speed as a user experience and speed as a scoreboard. Teams should care deeply about the first and sceptically about the second, checking that each round of optimisation still serves visitors rather than serving the metric itself.
A practical approach is to set a stopping rule before you start. Decide what good looks like for your site, fix the problems that hold you below it, and then redirect the remaining hours to content, links, and technical fixes with clearer payoffs. Revisit speed when something changes, such as a redesign or a traffic shift, rather than chasing it continuously.
That discipline is the real takeaway. Perfect scores feel like progress because they are easy to measure, but SEO progress is measured in rankings, traffic, and revenue. Spend the hours where those numbers move, and let a good speed score be good enough.
Stakeholder reporting should reflect that discipline too. A report that celebrates a perfect score while rankings and revenue stand still is measuring motion rather than progress, and it trains teams to chase the wrong target. Report speed alongside the outcomes it is supposed to serve, so that a decision to stop optimising and start publishing is recognised as good judgement rather than unfinished work.
Sources: Search Engine Land, October 30, 2026.
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