Go to pagespeed.web.dev, paste your homepage address, press Analyze, and stay on the Mobile tab. Read two numbers: the Performance score out of 100, and the Largest Contentful Paint time under it. Under 2.5 seconds is good; over 4 is poor.1 That is the whole test, and it is the one Google uses.
The steps
- Open pagespeed.web.dev on any device. It is Google's own tool and it is free.
- Paste your full homepage address, including
https://, and press Analyze. It takes about 30 seconds. - The page opens on the Mobile tab. Stay there. The Desktop tab is almost always greener and almost never what your customer sees.
- Read the Performance circle: 90 to 100 is green, 50 to 89 orange, under 50 red.
- Below it, read Largest Contentful Paint. That is the seconds until your headline or main photo appears. It is the number that matters.
- Scroll to Diagnostics. The first two or three items ("Properly size images", "Reduce unused JavaScript", "Eliminate render-blocking resources") are usually the whole story.
Mistakes that flatter the result
- Reading the Desktop tab. Everyone does it once. Homeowners search on phones.
- Testing a page nobody lands on. Test the homepage and the page your Google ad or your Business Profile points to.
- Trusting one run. Numbers move between runs. Run it twice; believe the worse one.
- Reading only the score. A 78 with a 2.1-second paint is a fine site. A 78 with a 4.8-second paint is losing calls.
Then run your competitors
Paste the two contractors above and below you in the map results. If both load faster, that is the gap, and the 2.5-second answer says what closing it is worth. The speed guide explains what each diagnostic means in plain words and what fixing it involves; the free audit runs this test on your site and the nearby competitors for you and writes it up.
PageSpeed says "No data" under the top section. Is something wrong?
No. That top section is real-user data Google only has for busy sites. Scroll down to the lab result, which is the test described here; it runs for every site.
Does the test see my site the way a phone does?
It simulates a mid-range Android phone on a slowed connection, which is closer to a homeowner in a driveway than your office Wi-Fi. It is a lab, not a person, but it is the same lab for every site.
Sources
- Google, web.dev: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP); Google, About PageSpeed Insights.
See this on your own site.
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