How many times have you received an audit telling you your site speed is bad? It is the number one topic in ecommerce SEO, and most of the time the audit is measuring the wrong thing.
The PageSpeed score is not a speed measurement
Google PageSpeed Insights gives you a score out of 100. That score is a weighted lab simulation, not a record of what your actual visitors experienced. I have seen the same site score 9 out of 100 and still pass its Core Web Vitals assessment, because the assessment uses real-world field data from real users.
So a red number in a testing tool does not mean you are failing, and a green one does not mean you are safe. If you want to know whether the server is genuinely slow, the honest metric is time to first byte, not a composite score.
Core Web Vitals are not the whole of ranking either
Even when Core Web Vitals genuinely fail, they are one input among many. Plenty of stores obsess over shaving milliseconds while much larger problems sit untouched: pages that never got indexed at all, broken redirects, thin category pages, or a checkout that quietly loses people.
Fix the bigger issues first. If Google is not indexing your pages, speed is irrelevant, which is the whole point of the indexing problem nobody checks. And if the traffic already arrives but does not buy, you have a conversion problem, not a speed problem.
How to read an audit you have been handed
Ask what data the numbers come from, lab or field. Ask which specific user experience is degraded and on which template. Ask what the expected revenue impact is. An audit that leads with a score and no answer to those questions is a document, not a diagnosis, and that gap between deck and delivery is exactly what to check in your own agency.
Then make sure the fixes actually ship, because the hard part is never the audit, it is getting the recommendations implemented.
If you have a speed audit you are not sure how to act on, book a call and I will tell you what is worth doing.