Designing for Users & Search

Performance & SEO Fundamentals

3 min read Foundations of Modern Web Development

Speed and search are intertwined. Learn the levers that move both.

Learning objectives

Identify the core web vitals
Apply basic on-page SEO practices
Understand why performance drives search ranking

Core web vitals

Google measures user experience through metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Interaction to Next Paint (INP). Fast pages win.

Performance levers

Compress images and serve the right sizes.
Minify CSS and JavaScript.
Cache aggressively and use a CDN.
Avoid render-blocking resources.

On-page SEO basics

One descriptive title and meta description per page.
Semantic headings in a logical order.
Descriptive, keyword-aware URLs.
Accessible, crawlable markup.

Key takeaways

Core web vitals are measurable targets, not opinions.
Performance improvements compound across the site.
SEO rewards sites that are fast and well-structured.