What is Google PageSpeed Insights?
PageSpeed Insights is a Google tool that evaluates a page’s loading speed and behavior on both mobile and desktop devices, offering concrete recommendations for improvement based on the results. It measures the loading time of a URL, calculates a score, and analyzes the website for potential optimizations. The great thing about it is that you can enter and check any URL here.
What Does Google PageSpeed Insights Measure?
Google PageSpeed Insights combines field data — collected by Google’s Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) — with lab data gathered by Lighthouse about a page. You can toggle between mobile and desktop views to see results for each.
As soon as the analysis is done, a PageSpeed score between 0 and 100 is displayed. This helps provide a rough assessment of your page’s performance. The performance score is a weighted average of different metrics, meaning that metrics with higher weights have a greater impact on the overall rating.
The individual weights are not visible in the Lighthouse report but can be seen in a tool called the “Lighthouse Scoring Calculator.” This tool can be used to calculate the PageSpeed score for any user-collected data.
Weights are chosen to provide a balanced representation of perceived user performance. The Lighthouse team regularly conducts research and updates weights over time as they gather feedback on which factors most affect user perception of performance. The history of these changes can be viewed on GitHub.
PageSpeed Insights provides a good initial overview of the loading time for a specific URL and its related performance.
It is important to note that this is not the only Google service that analyzes the loading time of a URL or domain.
Another site, https://pagespeed.web.dev/, offers very detailed analyses of the loading behavior of specific URLs.
If you use the Chrome browser, there is also an integrated auditing tool called “Lighthouse,” which can be used to check other aspects of page loading performance.
Different Google services look at different speed metrics, so it’s worth using several of these services — not just one — to get a more comprehensive picture.