Fast sites Google understands and crawls well.
A slow site loses visits and sales, and a poorly structured site loses rankings even with good content. I optimize performance against Google's metrics (Core Web Vitals) and review the technical SEO base: indexing, architecture, structured data and redirects.
Performance audit with PageSpeed, CrUX and Search Console.
Core Web Vitals: green LCP, CLS and INP, with special focus on mobile.
Cache, CDN, minification and deferred loading.
WebP or AVIF images with dimensions and lazyload.
Database cleanup and unused plugins removed.
Technical SEO: indexing, canonical, hreflang, sitemaps, robots and 301 redirects.
Validated structured data (schema).
Search Console flags URLs with poor Core Web Vitals.
Your site takes more than 3 seconds on mobile.
You migrated or redesigned and lost traffic.
You have pages that do not index or duplicate content.
Audit and a prioritized list of improvements by impact.
Changes applied on staging.
Before/after measurement.
Follow-up in Search Console in the weeks after.
No: the lab score is not what Google measures. The goal is real-user Core Web Vitals in the green.
It is one factor. Where it shows most is in conversion and in Google crawling and indexing your site better.
Sometimes. If the server is the bottleneck, I tell you with data.