PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a free tool from Google you can use to run a website speed test and get other performance insights on your website.
Simply pop the website address of your website into the Google PageSpeed Insights tool and you’ll see the results in less than 60-seconds.
PageSpeed Insights Overview
The Google PageSpeed Insights tool runs a series of checks on your website using Lighthouse, a speed tool from Google, as its analysis engine.
It also incorporates field data provided by the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) into the tool to add further depth.
PageSpeed Insights reports on the performance of a page on mobile and desktop devices and provides suggestions on how to improve that page.
What’s in the Report?
The report will give your page a score to summarise the performance. You will get a separate score for both your desktop and mobile performance.
A score of 90 or above is considered fast, with 50 to 90 considered moderate and below 50 being considered to be slow.
The insights report gives you a very detailed and somewhat technical performance overview, broken down into manageable tasks to improve.
Real-World Field Data
If your website has enough data, the insights tool will use data from its Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX).
The Chrome User Experience Report provides user experience metrics for how real-world Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web.
Lab data
PSI uses Lighthouse to analyze your webpage and generate a performance score that estimates the page’s performance on different metrics.
Each metric is scored and labelled with an icon:
- Fast is indicated with a green checkmark
- Moderate is indicated with an orange informational circle
- Slow is indicated with a red warning triangle
Audits
Lighthouse separates its audits into three sections:
- Opportunities provide suggestions on how to improve the page’s performance metrics. Each suggestion in this section estimates how much faster the page will load if the improvement is implemented.
- Diagnostics provide additional information about how a page adheres to best practices for web development.
- Passed Audits indicates the audits that have been passed by the page.
Conclusion
Slow websites not only result in poor user experience but are also now penalised by search engines and ranked lower in search results.
Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is one of many free website speed test tools available on the web today and can be very useful.
However, the majority of regular website owners may find the detail of the report to be rather technical and difficult to understand.
For a less-technical report, you could consider other free alternatives for testing the speed and performance of your website such as our free website audit or the website speed test by Pingdom.