Analyze your website with Google PageSpeed Insights

Definitions

Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool that analyzes your website’s performance, provides a score for both mobile and desktop devices, and offers recommendations to make it faster and more efficient.

Before you start

✅ You can analyze any type of website on Google PageSpeed Insights. However, if you have a WordPress website, it’s recommended to run an X-ray report instead.

ℹ️ Google PageSpeed Insights scores range from 0 to 100.

🚨 Take Google PageSpeed results with caution, as they may not fully reflect real-world user experience, for example:

• ➡️ A perfect 100 score is ideal but often unnecessary. A score of 85 or above indicates good performance, and striving for perfection might not be worth the effort.

• ➡️ A higher PageSpeed score doesn’t guarantee a higher ranking. While speed helps, great content and strong SEO practices have a more substantial impact on your ranking.

• ➡️ A low PageSpeed score doesn’t always mean your website is slow. Real-world factors can affect actual load time more than the technical rules used by PageSpeed Insights.

❗When using third-party tools and working on website performance, it’s recommended to consult with a professional website developer.

⚠️ The best speed test can be an ‘eye test’, i.e., go to your website in a browser and see if it loads quickly.

Step by step

1. Go to the Google PageSpeed Insights website

2. Enter your website URL in the provided field

3. Click the Analyze button to start the insights process

4. Wait for the tool to run and pull up results for Mobile and Desktop

5. Now you can start interpreting your results. However, here is some important context to keep in mind:

Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool uses Lighthouse to analyze websites. Lighthouse checks how fast a website loads, how it looks on mobile phones, and whether it follows best practices for a good user experience.

It generates your PageSpeed Score based on lab data, which includes metrics such as First Contentful Paint (FCP), Speed Index, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Time to Interactive (TTI), Total Blocking Time (TBT), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

In simpler terms, these metrics measure when the first visual or meaningful content appears, how quickly a page can load and become interactive, how visual stability is maintained, and how soon a page becomes fully interactive.

However, it’s important to remember that these metrics and the resulting PageSpeed Score don’t always perfectly reflect your users’ real-world experience. Factors such as the user’s device type, browser, and network conditions can greatly influence the actual loading experience.