#ASKTHEINDUSTRY 30: Should I care about running PageSpeed Insights?
I think so. I surely do, and I believe it is one of the easiest way to:
- Have a high level overview of common best practices and quick wins that can be applied to the site in analysis
- Make sure, as you are working on it, that there is no regression
In case you haven’t googled it already, PageSpeed Insights is an online tool published by Google that measures the performance of a page for both mobile and desktop devices. A peculiar aspect is that, instead of hitting you with metrics and figures, PageSpeed Insights yields out a score from 0 to 100 and a series of actionable suggestions on how you can improve things.
What I like the most about it, is the fact that it only considers the network-independent aspects of page performance. This way, everything it shows you is in your power to change, and you can take action upon them immediately!
What type of information can it give to you, then? For example, it can point out issues with your server configuration, the structure of the HTML page, the way you dish and prepare images, JavaScript and CSS.
In my experience, it is a great tool to keep yourself in check and to be 100% sure that you haven’t forgotten anything of importance. For instance:
- It tells you if you enabled compression of assets
- It checkes whether the rendering of the Above the Fold content can happen with the first roundtrip
- It calls you on unminified HTML, CSS and JS
- It checks for unwanted redirects
It even warns you if your server response time gets beyond the recommended 200ms!
Don’t be mistaken, though. PageSpeed Insights is in no way useful to identify the cause of particular issues, or to have detailed information. It still has its place in my workflow, and it regularly gets me!
If you’ve found this post useful at all, press the ❤ button! I read each and every comment, so be sure to contribute to the conversation with your thoughts!
