A couple of days ago I ran onto HubSpot's post 32 of the Best Website Designs to Inspire You in 2020.
In most cases, these types of posts reflect personal preferences that are biased to the author’s liking. Nothing wrong with that + this post really has some awesomely looking websites. Designing/developing a website is a balancing act between businesses, their audience expectation, and the toolset they've chosen. Something of performance vs functionality game in which you make compromises to satisfy as wide an audience as you possibly can... or not.
Still, I was interested in the performance part of the story in reference to this list and wanted to see how things are in that department. Now, I've done something similar previously with the speed and performance of Web dev, SEO, and marketing agencies’ websites. So I pretty much had the template for this. To cut the story short, here are the results.
Most of these need a bit of improvement when it comes to performance (most are in Googles 50 to 89 (Orange): Needs Improvement range). Satisfyingly enough only a couple have CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift ) problems. Why is it important?
With Google announcing page experience inclusion to Search and CLS being a part of it it might be the best time to learn what core web vitals are.
Core Web Vitals tell if a page provides a great user experience, focusing on the aspects of loading, interactivity, and visual stability. They are platform agnostic ie it does not matter if your website sits on WordPress, Shopify or if it’s built with any of the popular static site generators.
Let's not generalize conclusions here.
The results, while not perfect, depend much on the industry and the needs of businesses, and the expectations of their audience.
So, yeah, performance, while it matters for many reasons, is not and should not be the end goal.
However, with upcoming changes, it might become an aspect of your website you should enhance a bit.