Google has rolled out a major update to its PageSpeed insights tool. In its earlier version, the tool gave a pretty simple picture of how your site performed. With this update, much more information is presented, and the tool is integrated with Lighthouse, Google’s auditing tool.
Having fast loading pages is crucial for your website. As well as being a ranking factor for mobile search it’s key to a good user experience and can improve conversion rates.
This update to the tool means you have more information at your disposal to make improvements. So, let's take a closer look.
The overall score for speed is still there, as well as the separate tabs for Mobile and Desktop, but there’s a lot more detailed data available.
Field Data shows the average loading speed of the page compared to other pages in the Chrome Experience report over the past 30 days.
Lab Data has Lighthouse analysis of 6 performance metrics:
- First Contentful Paint (the time at which the first text or image is painted).
- Speed Index (how quickly the contents of a page are visibly populated.)
- Time to Interactive (the time at which the page is fully interactive.)
- First Meaningful Paint (when the primary content of a page is visible.)
- First CPU Idle (the first time at which the page's main thread is quiet enough to handle input)
- Estimated Input Latency (an estimate of how long your app takes to respond to user input, in milliseconds, during the busiest 5s window of page load)
Below these metrics you can see a visual sequence of how the page loads on a browser.
An Opportunities section shows you measures you can take to improve the performance of the webpage, with an estimate of loading time saved.
The Diagnostics section shows how the page matches up to best practices for web development, while Passed Audits shows the various audits that the page passed, so you can see what was done correctly to improve loading time.
Google has been consistent in emphasising the importance of page speed and the PageSpeed Insights tool is a great resource to see what you can improve on for your own site.
For more details, go to Google’s blog post.
