How to test your own website with PageSpeed Insights

You don't need to be technical to find out whether your website is fast and well-built. Google offers a free tool called PageSpeed Insights that tests any web page and gives it scores. It takes about a minute.

This post walks through running a test and reading the results, so you know what to look at and what to ignore. For what the scores themselves mean, see what is Google Lighthouse, and what do its four scores mean?

Running a test

1. Open pagespeed.web.dev in your browser.
2. Type or paste your website address, for example https://yourshop.in, and press Analyze.
3. Wait while Google loads your page on its own servers. This usually takes under a minute.
4. The results appear, with a Mobile tab and a Desktop tab.

That's it. You can test any page: your home page, your menu, your contact page. You can also test other websites, which is a useful way to compare.

Reading the results

The page has two main parts. It helps to know which is which.

Part 1: Real visitors' experience

At the top, you may see a section about what real users are experiencing, based on anonymous data from Chrome users who visited your site. It shows your Core Web Vitals and whether your page passes.

Many small business websites don't have enough visitors for this data, and you'll see a message saying so. That's normal and nothing to worry about. Use the test scores below instead.

Part 2: The test scores

Below that, you'll see four circular scores from Lighthouse, each out of 100:

• Performance: how fast the page loads and responds
• Accessibility: how easy it is for everyone to use, including people with disabilities
• Best Practices: whether it follows modern standards for security and quality
• SEO: whether search engines can read and understand it

The colours give a quick summary:

• Green (90–100): good
• Orange (50–89): needs improvement
• Red (0–49): poor

What to look at first

The Performance score on mobile

This is usually the most useful single number. If it's red or low orange, your site is likely slow for real customers on phones. See how a slow website quietly loses customers.

The few biggest suggestions

Scroll down to the Performance section. You'll see diagnostics and opportunities, listing what slows your page down, roughly in order of impact. Focus on the top few. Common ones for small business sites:

• Properly size images and serve images in modern formats: your photos are too large. See WebP and AVIF.
• Reduce unused JavaScript: the page loads code it doesn't need, often from plugins
• Eliminate render-blocking resources: some files must load before anything appears
• Reduce initial server response time: the hosting is slow. See what is a CDN.

Accessibility and SEO

These scores are often easier to improve. The suggestions are usually specific: missing image descriptions, text with low contrast, buttons without labels, a missing page description. See website accessibility and page titles and meta descriptions.

What not to worry about

• Small changes between runs. Scores vary a little each time, because of network conditions and the test itself. Run the test two or three times and look at the general level.
• Every single warning. Some suggestions have very little real effect. Fix the big ones first.
• Perfect 100s. A well-built site in the 90s is in excellent shape. Chasing the last few points rarely helps customers.
• Comparing mobile and desktop directly. Mobile tests simulate a slower phone and connection, so mobile scores are almost always lower.

Test more than the home page

Your home page may be fast while other pages are slow. Test the pages customers actually use: your menu or products page, which often has the most photos, your contact page with its form and map, and any page you share often on WhatsApp or Instagram. A heavy embedded map or a long gallery can pull down a page's score on its own.

Test after changes

Run a test whenever something changes: a new website, a redesign, new plugins, a new hero photo. It's an easy way to catch a problem before customers notice it. Save a screenshot of the results each time, so you can compare later.

Questions to ask your web designer

1. What are our mobile and desktop scores today?
2. What are the top three things slowing our site down?
3. How will you fix them, and what scores do you expect afterwards?
4. Can you show me a test after the changes?

Our own scores

Every site we build is tuned to score 90+ on Lighthouse for performance, SEO, accessibility and best practices. We measure them with PageSpeed Insights, on Google's servers, and show the real scores for our client sites on how we build and our work, with a link to re-run each test yourself.