PageSpeed Insights: how to read your website's report

The two halves of the report

At the top, what your real visitors experience. Google collects data from people who visit your site in Chrome over the last 28 days. This is the part that matters most, because it isn't a simulation. If your site doesn't get much traffic, it will say there isn't enough data. That's normal for a small business, not an error.

Below, a lab test. Google loads your site on a simulated phone over a deliberately slow connection and scores it from 0 to 100: green from 90 to 100, orange from 50 to 89, red below 50. It's useful for finding problems, but it's a test, not your customers' experience.

If the two halves disagree, trust the top one.

Core Web Vitals, minus the jargon

These are the three measurements Google uses to decide whether a site gives a good experience. Each one answers a simple question:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how long until the important part shows up? Good is under 2.5 seconds. It's usually the main photo or the headline.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint): how long does it take to react when you tap something? Good is under 200 milliseconds. If you press a button and nothing happens, this one is red.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): does the page jump around while it loads? Good is under 0.1. It's what happens when you go to tap a link and everything suddenly moves down because an ad or an image has loaded.

If all three are green on mobile, your site is fine. If one is red, start there.

What to fix first

On the small business sites I review, the problem is almost always in the same places, in this order:

• Images that are far too heavy. A photo straight off a phone can weigh 4 MB; the same photo prepared for the web, 150 KB. It's the cheapest fix and the one you notice most.
• Extras. The chat widget nobody uses, the homepage slider, three ad pixels, a plugin for everything. Each one adds code the phone has to download and run before the site responds.
• Fonts. Four font families with six weights each add up. One or two is plenty.
• The server. If the site takes ages to start loading before it even shows anything, the problem is the hosting or how the site is built, not the photos.

The report's “Opportunities” list tells you how much time each fix would save. Start with the biggest.

Don't chase 100

The score moves a few points every time you run the test, so run it two or three times before drawing conclusions. And a 100 doesn't sell anything on its own: what loses you customers is a site that takes five seconds to show anything on a phone. Going from red to green matters; going from 92 to 100, not much.

That said, it can be done. This site scores 99+ on all four tests, on mobile and desktop: check it yourself, then run the test on yours. If you want to know why the gap is so big, I explain it in WordPress or a custom-built website?

If your site comes up red

Send me the address. I'll run the test, tell you what's slowing it down, and whether it's worth fixing or cheaper to rebuild. Sometimes it's just the photos and it's an afternoon's work — I'll tell you that too.

Jean Ayala — web development in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Fast websites for island businesses.