How to Use Google PageSpeed Insights

If you have recently started a new website or are looking to improve the performance of your existing website, you can use the free Google tool called Pagespeed Insights.

What is Google Pagespeed Insights?

Google Pagespeed Insights is a free reporting software that informs you how fast or slow your website is on both desktop and mobile, and presents a list of action items to help you improve the speed and overall performance of your website. It is extremely helpful in allowing you to provide a better user experience for your customers and/or readers to help you decrease your site’s bounce rate.

The neat part about the tool is that it presents many different site speed issues that you may not have even been aware about. Some of the most common improvements are Javascript issues and the need to reduce image file sizes. The software is very eye-opening and the best part is that it is completely free to use.

Important features of the tool

In order to use the tool properly, you must understand the below features, which make up the layout of the tool.

Core Web Vitals Assessment: These are Google-developed metrics at a basic level to see how users interact with a page. There are typically six of them presented on each site assessment. The tool will tell you whether you pass or fail this assessment.

Performance Score: Anywhere from 0-100. 0-49 is a bad score, 50-89 is intermediate, and 90-100 is considered a pretty good score.

Metrics: These are numerical stats that show you how long it takes to load specific types of content, usually in seconds. Some examples of these metrics are ‘Time to Interactive’ and ‘Speed Index’.

Opportunities: To improve your site speed, Google presents you with a list of opportunities to improve your user experience. It will tell you exactly how many seconds you will save by making the improvement under ‘Estimated Savings’.

Diagnostics: This is one of the most important parts you must navigate to, as it tells you exactly what is slowing your site’s performance. You must go through each and every one of these starting from the ones in red (0-49 score).

Passed Audits: Although not as much of an important area to look at, you can see what audits you got a good score on, and do not need to focus on, in case you are curious.

Similar alternatives

GTMetrix is a tool very similar to Google Pagespeed Insights that allows you to do pretty much everything listed above. The main difference is that this tool assigns you a letter grade score instead of just a number score. GTMetrix also has a paid plan for higher functionality. There are some other good alternatives that you may or may not have heard of. In either case, you can check this out to learn more about the alternatives.

Learning about your website’s performance is crucial to keep up with the most beneficial SEO opportunities. If you have developers, you can leverage their expertise to take care of all the action items that Google gives to you. If you do not have developers and have trouble understanding the material that is presented to you, you can hire a reputable developer on gig sites such as Fiverr and Upwork to help you. However, beware of inexperienced gig workers that may provide bad-quality services. You need to do a great deal of research to make sure that you are headed in the right direction, otherwise, it will backfire.