Users say the site is slow but Lighthouse says 95

Lighthouse runs from a US data center against your US server. Your users are 10,000 km away and every API call pays that distance, several times per page.

Check: open DevTools → Network with throttling set to "Slow 4G" and watch how many sequential requests one click makes. Then:

• Put the static site on a CDN (Vercel/Netlify do this by default).
• Batch API calls: one request per page, not one per widget.
• If your users are in one region, host the database near them.

Lighthouse measures your server. Your users measure the distance.