Page speed test

Two kinds of speed figure

PageSpeed Insights gives two different things, and they are easily confused. Real-visitor data (the Chrome UX Report) is how fast the page actually was for Chrome users over the past 28 days. Lab data is one simulated visit on a set device and connection — useful for finding the cause of a slow page, but not a measure of what your visitors get.

Google's guidance is about the first kind. Its Core Web Vitals documentation says "We highly recommend site owners achieve good Core Web Vitals for success with Search", that this "aligns with what our core ranking systems seek to reward", and sets the thresholds for good: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1 (Google: Core Web Vitals).

When there is no real-visitor data

Google only reports real-visitor figures for pages and sites with enough Chrome traffic. A new or small site often has none. That is not a fault and not a sign of a slow page — it means the lab score is all there is, and it should be read as a guide to causes, not as a grade.

How this test runs

Google takes 20 to 60 seconds to test a page, longer than a web page can wait, so the test runs in the background and this page checks for the answer by itself. The answer is kept for 30 minutes so the page can show it, then forgotten. Only a few run at once across the whole site; if they are all busy you will be asked to try again in a minute.

Next: check compression and caching headers, or run a full audit.