Erwin Hofman: Web performance in 2025: putting real UX first

You got a 100% Lighthouse score? Hold the celebration! Core Web Vitals may disagree, and even they have survivor bias, ignoring your slowest users and everyone who bounced before loading. Real user data tells the real story. Join Karlijn and Erwin as we combine Google's latest DevTools insights with real user monitoring to show why standard metrics mislead, how to spot hidden speed blockers, and focus on what users actually experience. We'll cut through the noise with practical tools and real-world data to fix what truly matters. Want to see past those vanity scores? We'll guide you there with some memes along the way.

Erwin Hofman has been a web developer since 2001, first as a freelancer and then as an agency owner. Continued annoyance about the state of the web in terms of web performance turned into being an expert in fixing it.

As a web performance consultant, Erwin kept running into the same problem with clients: he was missing the insights they actually needed. So he built RUMvision, a tool that shows how real people experience websites, not just what lab tests say. As a full stack developer and Google Developer Expert, Erwin still codes daily in JavaScript, CSS, and PHP (still not dead!). The fact that he's still in the trenches makes it easy for him to relate to developers facing web performance challenges.

Erwin loves playing around with what's new on the web, from Chrome origin trials like LoAF and soft navigations to finding actionable issues that make performance better for everyone. He shares these discoveries with his 15k LinkedIn followers regularly. You'll catch him at conferences like performance.now(), We Love Speed, and MageTitans making technical talks actually fun with quizzes and memes, and you definitely won't miss him in his signature hats and bowties. He approaches everything like his years as a soccer goalkeeper, always trying to keep the score as good as possible.

Based in Groningen with his wife and business partner Karlijn and their little girl, Erwin spends half the year wondering why he lives in the Netherlands with all this rain while nursing his addiction to iced coffee slushies and dreaming of sunshine. At least slow websites give him something else to complain about.