A friendlier PageSpeed Insights

What PageSpeed Insights does better than us

• It is the source of truth. PSI is Google’s own tool. If there is ever a discrepancy between us, believe PSI — we are reading its API and could have a bug in how we interpret it.
• It audits far more than performance. Accessibility, SEO and best practices come in the same run. We request the performance category only, so we tell you nothing about your contrast ratios or your meta tags.
• Desktop as well as mobile. PSI tests both. We only test mobile, because that is what Google ranks on and where the problems are — but if you need a desktop number, we do not have one.
• The full diagnostic detail. The JavaScript treemap, the complete audit list with every passing check, the network dependency tree, the exact element identified as your LCP. We surface the opportunities and the vitals; PSI shows you everything Lighthouse produced.
• No rate limit, and it will never disappear. We limit checks to 20 per hour per person to stay inside our API quota, and we are one person’s side project. PSI is infrastructure.
• It is always on the current Lighthouse. Ours is too, since we call the same API — but PSI’s presentation always matches whatever Lighthouse changed this quarter, and our interpretation layer can lag behind.

What we changed, and why

• No score at the top. PSI opens with a number in a coloured ring, and people optimise for that number. It compresses six measurements into one and then tells you nothing about which one to change. Ours opens with a sentence naming the single highest-impact fix, and puts the score at the bottom.
• Plain language instead of audit titles. “Eliminate render-blocking resources” is precise and it is also opaque if you do not already know what it means. We say which files block the first paint and what to do about them.
• An estimate of what it is worth. PSI tells you how many milliseconds you could save. That is the right unit for an engineer and the wrong one for anyone deciding whether to fund the work. We convert it into conversions, transparently and with the assumption stated.
• “No field data” explained rather than shown as a warning. This is the single most confusing thing about PSI for site owners, and it looks like an error when it is completely normal. We explain it in place.
• We call the CrUX API directly. Google is phasing field data out of the PSI response, so we query the Chrome UX Report ourselves and fall back from URL-level to origin-level data, telling you which one you are looking at.
• A conditional, disclosed hosting suggestion. PSI recommends nothing commercial at all, which is the honest baseline. We show a hosting suggestion only when your server response exceeds 600ms, label it as an affiliate link, and show nothing when your bottleneck is anything else.

Which to use

Use PageSpeed Insights when you want the complete picture, a desktop result, the other Lighthouse categories, or when you want to check something we said.

Use this when you want to know what to do on Monday morning and how to justify spending the time. If you want a request waterfall instead, that is GTmetrix’s strength, not ours.