Google has recently updated its PageSpeed Insight tool it is now version 5, and there have been some big changes to the way in which your webpage score is assessed.

PageSpeed Insights now uses Chrome’s Lighthouse extension as its analysis engine, as well as incorporating field data from chrome user experience report (CrUX). This has largely changed the page scores that users are given compared to the previous version.

The new Insight report has 2 tabs like it did before for mobile and desktop but now each of these tabs is split into 5 sections:

So, what’s new?

  • Field Data – This uses the Chrome User Experience report to show you how your page speed compares to other pages in the CrUX report. It displays the First Contentful Paint (FCP), where the browser renders the first bit of content, and First Input Delay(FID), which is the time from when a user interacts with the page and the browser responding.
  • Origin Summary – This is much like the field data report in that it return speed data from the CrUX report but in this case it shows how the page speed is like for pages from this page it also shows FCP and FID
  • Lab Data – The Lighthouse analysis of the page on an emulated mobile network it shows First Contentful Paint, Speed Index, Time to Interactive, First Meaningful Paint, First CPU Idle, Estimated Input Latency and then shows screenshots of how the page is rendered.
  • Opportunities – The list of task that can speed up the page like image optimisation and Deferring unused CSS, etc as well as showing you an estimate how faster the page could load for each task.
  • Diagnostics – More information about the pages performance, like errors in the cache policy or the Critical Request Depth
  • Passed Audits – This shows you the list of tasks that have already been completed as well as showing you if these can be improved any more.

What does this mean for advertisers?

This update is a great help to advertisers assessing the quality of the landing page they are sending traffic to. The score gives a good indication on the effectiveness and speed of the landing page, whilst providing solutions to improve this score. Here at Blue Thirst, we have found it much more informative on recommendations to improve page load speed.

If you currently are using the V4 API for PageSpeed Insights, you have 6 months before it is deprecated where V5 will need to be used.