How to audit your page speed properly

Before you start

• Your site live on a public URL
• Optionally Search Console for the Core Web Vitals report

The steps

1. 1

   Step 1: Run PageSpeed Insights

   Enter your URL at pagespeed.web.dev. Test the mobile tab first — that is how most people arrive.

2. 2

   Step 2: Read the field data first

   The Core Web Vitals section at the top, if present. This is aggregated from real Chrome users over 28 days.

3. 3

   Step 3: Note the three metrics

   LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1. Each is measured at the 75th percentile, so a quarter of visitors had it worse.

4. 4

   Step 4: Then read the lab diagnostics

   The opportunities list tells you what to fix. Ignore the score itself and read the reasons.

5. 5

   Step 5: Test more than the home page

   The pages people land on from search, and the checkout if you have one.

6. 6

   Step 6: Check Search Console

   Core Web Vitals report → groups URLs by shared problem, which is how you find a template-level issue rather than a page-level one.

7. 7

   Step 7: Fix the largest item first

   Usually images or render-blocking resources. One change often moves the number more than five small ones.

Why the score is the least useful number on the page

It is a weighted composite of lab metrics from a simulated mid-range device. It varies between runs on identical pages. Treat it as a rough indicator and spend your attention on the field data and the specific diagnostics.

When there is no field data

A site with too little traffic shows no Core Web Vitals section at all. That is not a failure — it means Chrome does not have 28 days of samples. Use the lab data, and revisit once traffic builds.

The background behind this

Core Web Vitals, and the order that actually reduces them covers the reasoning in about 3 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who wrote this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada, Ireland and Pakistan. These procedures are the ones I run on client work, written down rather than invented — including the ones where the honest answer is that the fix is not available on your current hosting.