How to measure your site's speed

Free tools to check how fast your website loads right now, what the results mean, and how to share them with your team.

Before you can improve your site's speed, you need to know where it stands. Several free tools can measure your site in minutes. This guide walks you through the most useful ones.

Quick summary

Google PageSpeed Insights is the best starting point — it's free, takes about a minute, and reports the same Core Web Vitals measurements that Search Console's own report is built from. Test your homepage and one or two other key pages.

What you'll need

Your website address (URL)
A browser — any browser on any device

Tool 1: Google PageSpeed Insights (recommended)

PageSpeed Insights is Google's free speed testing tool. It shows your Core Web Vitals and gives specific recommendations.

Open PageSpeed Insights. Go to pagespeed.web.dev in your browser.

Enter your URL. Type your full web address (including https://) in the box and click Analyze. The test takes about 30–60 seconds.

Check the top section first. If your site has enough visitor traffic, the report opens with field data — real measurements from real visitors over the previous 28 days. This is the most meaningful data. Below it sits lab data, a single simulated load of the page. If a page has too little visitor data of its own, Google falls back to figures for your whole site, and if there is too little of that, it shows no real-visitor data at all.

Look at your Core Web Vitals. Each metric is marked good (green), needs improvement (amber) or poor (red). Focus on any red or amber items.

Scroll down to the suggestions below the metrics. These are the specific things that are slowing your site down, each with an estimate of what fixing it would save. Google's own docs call this part of the report by different names, so read whatever list sits under the scores.

Test mobile, not just desktop

PageSpeed Insights reports mobile and desktop separately, so check both tabs. The mobile figures matter most: Google indexes and ranks your site from its mobile version, and its simulated test deliberately uses a mid-tier phone on a mobile network rather than a fast laptop.

Tool 2: GTmetrix

GTmetrix gives a different perspective. Its strength is the waterfall chart — a visual timeline of every file your page loads — which is helpful for spotting what is taking the longest.

GTmetrix is especially useful when you want to see:

Which specific files are slowest to load
Where in the loading sequence bottlenecks appear

Check gtmetrix.com for what its free tier currently includes and whether you need an account. The plans and limits change, so read them there rather than trusting a description of them here.

Tool 3: Google Search Console (for real traffic data)

If your site has Google Search Console set up (ask us if you are not sure), it includes a Core Web Vitals report. This report is based on real visitor data from the last 28 days — not a simulation.

This is the most accurate view of how your site actually performs for your visitors. The report groups similar pages together and labels each group Poor, Need improvement or Good, based on its worst-performing metric, so you can see which pages need the most attention. Only indexed pages appear, and groups without enough visitor data are left out altogether.

See What is Google Search Console? for more.

What to do with the results

You do not need to understand every detail of the report. The most useful things to note are:

Your Core Web Vitals pass/fail status — are they in the green?
The top two or three opportunities — these have the biggest impact
Your overall performance score — for a rough comparison over time

If you see red scores, or items about unused JavaScript or serving images in modern formats near the top, those are priorities worth discussing with us.

Share the results with us

If you are unsure what to do next, take a screenshot of your PageSpeed Insights results (or copy the URL from your browser) and send it to us. We can walk you through what matters most.

How often should you check?

You do not need to check constantly. A useful rhythm is:

After any major site update or redesign
If you notice the site feeling slow
Once every three to six months as a routine check
Before a big marketing campaign (so you know the site can handle traffic)

Common questions

My score is different every time I test. Is that normal?

Yes. Google names local network availability, the hardware running the test and competition for its resources as the usual sources of that variation, and the test runs from one of its data centres in North America, Europe or Asia, which can differ between runs. Run two or three tests and look at the average. A consistent red score is a real problem; a single low score on an otherwise green site is probably just noise.

Should I test every page or just the homepage?

Your homepage is the most important single page to test. But if you have a key landing page, a product page, or a page you are actively promoting, test those too. Different pages can have very different scores depending on the images and scripts they load.

What is a 'good' score?

Google's own thresholds: 90 or above is good, 50 to 89 needs improvement, below 50 is poor. But the score is less important than the individual Core Web Vitals — a score of 75 with all Core Web Vitals in the green is better than a score of 95 with one failing metric. Google says as much itself: a good lab score does not guarantee that real visitors are having a good experience.

Need a hand?

If you're stuck, email support@chykalophia.com and we'll help. Include your website address and a screenshot if you can.