If you’re reading this article, you’ve probably spent time and resources building your website, but there’s a problem that has refused to go away – it loads slowly. A slow website can be frustrating for everyone – webmasters, site owners, developers, and even users, who may find another page that answers their questions faster. Fortunately, PageSpeed Insights, a web performance tool, can help speed up your website.
Googe’s PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that lets you find and fix issues by providing insights into a page’s performance while offering high-level recommendations on how the page may be improved. It provides performance monitoring for pages and returns comprehensive data alongside valuable suggestions on how to optimize the pages.
PSI provides two types of data: lab and field. The lab data includes insights useful for debugging performance issues, while the field data covers everything related to real-world user experience. The field data comprises insights collected from the Chrome User Experience Report Crux).
As mentioned earlier, the Chrome User Experience report is the source of PageSpeed Insights field data. The reports provide data using the following metrics:
- First Contentful Paint (FCP) describes perceived load speed by measuring the time it takes to first render text or image by the browser. A fast FCP is an indicator that something is happening.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) describes perceived load speed by measuring the time it takes to render the largest image or text block relative to the browser. A fast LCP indicates that the page is useful.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): It describes visual stability by reporting unexpected layout shifts experienced by the user. A low CLS indicates that the page is delightful.
- First Input Delay: It measures to quantify the time taken to load the main content on the page. A low FID indicates that a website is optimized correctly.
- Interaction to Next Paint: It describes page responsiveness by quantifying the latency of all interactions throughout the entire page’s life cycle. A low INP indicates that a page will be reliably responsive at all times.
- Total Blocking Time: It describes load responsiveness by measuring the severity of how a page was unresponsive until it became responsive. A low TBT means that the page is usable.
PageSpeed Insights categorizes all user experiences into three group of scores namely Good, Need Improvement and Poor. Here is the scores for each datasets and categories:
- FCP [0, 1800ms]
- FID [0, 100ms]
- LCP [0, 2500ms]
- CLS [0, 0.1]
- INP (experimental) [0.200ms]
- TTFB (experimental) [0.800ms]
- FCP [1800ms, 3000ms]
- FID [100ms, 300ms]
- LCP [2500ms, 4000ms]
- CLS [0.1, 0.25]
- INP (experimental) [200ms, 500ms]
- TTFB (experimental) [800ms. 1800ms]
- FCP over 3000ms
- FID over 300ms
- LCP over 4000ms
- CLS over 0.25
- INP (experimental) [over 500ms]
- TTFB (experimental) [over 1800ms]
- Opportunities: This section provides actionable insights about improving your page’s performance while also estimating how fast your page will load if you adopt the recommendations.
- Diagnostics: This section provides additional information on how your page conforms to best web development practices.
- Passed audits: This section provides an overview of all the audits that your page has passed.
PageSpeed is a tool that can help boost your page’s speed, thus offering an array of benefits that improve your SEO performance and the digital experience of your visitors. For that reason, you might want to start leveraging the tool today. If you need more resources, you can also read our introduction to Android benchmarks.