Getting Started

Get started with Page Speed Monitoring: your first scheduled page speed test takes just a few clicks.

What a Page Speed Test Checks

A page speed test runs a Lighthouse-based check against a URL of your choice, from a location you pick, on a schedule you control. Each run reports a Performance Score, SEO Score, Accessibility Score and Best Practices Score, plus the Core Web Vitals measured in the lab (Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift) and other timing metrics like First Contentful Paint, Speed Index, Total Blocking Time and Server Response Time (TTFB). Interaction to Next Paint (INP) comes from real-user field data rather than the lab run. Because the test keeps running on schedule, you get a history of these numbers instead of a single one-off snapshot, so you can tell whether a deploy, a new script, or a bloated image made things worse.

Creating Your First Test

Using the quick new test configurator on the Tests page you can just add your website endpoint, select the location of your test, device and schedule interval and you're ready to go:

What You Configure

• Name: the name fills in from the URL, but you can rename it to something you'll recognize later, like "homepage EU" or "checkout page mobile".
• Location: the geographical location the check runs from. Pick one close to where most of your real visitors are, so the numbers reflect what they actually experience.
• URL: the website or web page you want monitored.
• Device: Mobile, Desktop or both. Each simulates loading the page on that device type, and scores can differ quite a bit between the two, so it's worth monitoring both if mobile traffic matters to you.
• Schedule: how often the test runs: hourly, every 6 hours, every 12 hours, every 24 hours, every 48 hours or every week (or None for no schedule). Hourly, every 6 hours and every 12 hours need a paid plan.

For a full field-by-field walkthrough, see how to run a new page speed test.

Adding Alerts

In the app, a monitor is the alert rule you attach to a test. Once the test exists, click Add monitor in its row on the Tests page, or Create New and then Monitor. You can also start on the Monitors page with New Monitor, which creates the test and its alert together. See how to create a new alert and the full list of metrics you can trigger an alert on.

After the First Run

Once the test starts running on its schedule, results accumulate on the test's page, so you can watch scores and Core Web Vitals trend over days and weeks instead of judging your site off a single run. If you configured an alert, you get notified through the channels you set up whenever the metric you're watching crosses your threshold.

The Tests page lists every test with its latest results. On the Metrics tab, the LCP, CLS and PAGE WEIGHT columns show a small trend line of the recent runs. The Field data tab shows real-user Core Web Vitals from the Chrome UX Report for each test (LCP, INP and CLS at the 75th percentile over the last 28 days), for that page or, when the page has too little traffic, for the whole site. Test all now runs every test on the page after you confirm. Each run counts toward your plan limits, and if fewer runs are left than tests, the confirmation says how many will run.

That's it: one configurator, a handful of fields, and you have a recurring check you can build alerts and trend tracking on top of.