How to Test Your Website Speed in Google?

Slow-loading websites can adversely affect user experience, bounce rates, and SEO rankings. We discussed measuring website speed, performance, and KPIs and mentioned that Google provides several tools to test website speed; the most commonly used are Google PageSpeed Insights and Google Lighthouse.

Here's how to use these tools in the simplest possible way:

Google PageSpeed Insights

1. Navigate to Google PageSpeed Insights (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights).
2. Enter your website URL into the provided field.
3. Click the "Analyze" button.
4. The tool will analyze your website and provide a report. The report includes an overall speed score for your website's mobile and desktop versions. A higher score indicates a faster website.
5. The report also offers detailed information about potential speed issues, such as slow server response time, render-blocking resources, unused JavaScript, etc. Recommendations for improving your website's speed are also provided.

Google Lighthouse

1. Google Lighthouse is a part of Google Chrome's Developer Tools. To use it, first, open the Google Chrome browser.
2. Navigate to your website.
3. Right-click anywhere on the webpage and select "Inspect" to open the Chrome Developer Tools.
4. Navigate to the "Lighthouse" tab in the panel that appears.
5. Check the "Performance" category and click the "Generate report" button.
6. Lighthouse will run several checks and then provide a detailed report. The report includes a performance score, which gives a general indication of your website's speed. It also includes a detailed breakdown of specific performance metrics such as First Contentful Paint (FCP), Speed Index, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), etc.
7. The report also suggests possible improvements and diagnostic information.

These Google tools provide invaluable insights into your website's performance, but remember, they provide a synthetic view of your site's speed. Real-world conditions vary based on the user's device capabilities, network conditions, browser, and geographic location.

Google Search Console and the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) provide a more realistic assessment of your site's speed as experienced by actual users. On top of that, CrUX is the official dataset of the Web Vitals program, meaning that the data for the Core Web Vitals report comes from the CrUX report, which is then used in Search to influence rankings.

Check our Frontend Performance Measuring & KPIs post for more on this subject. Also, our frontend performance checklist is a good place to start when working on your website page speed.