Automate PageSpeed Insights Tests
Updated on Aug 01, 2024
- PageSpeedPlus automates pagespeed testing
- It scans high priority URLs defined by you
- It scans an entire site based on the sitemap.xml
PageSpeed Insights(PSI) is a powerful tool but it only checks one page at a time. The scores have a huge effect on user experience and search position so it’s a good idea to make sure that all pages on your site are fast.
However, doing this takes hours because you have to manually paste URLs into the PSI interface every time you want to measure a URL.
What if there was a better tool to Automate Pagespeed Insights Testing? One that could check your pages at scheduled intervals and send a nice report without anything being needed from you. Well, now there is - PagespeedPlus.com automatically scans your URLs hourly, daily or weekly and notifies you with the results. Best of all, there's no need to mess around with scripts or API Keys.
Setting URLs and scan frequency
Contents
- What Is PageSpeedPlus
Automate PageSpeed Insights Tests - Step by Step- Using the Data
- How It Works
- Benefits
- PageSpeed Insights Vs WebPageTest Vs GTMetrix
- Conclusion
What is PageSpeedPlus
PageSpeedPlus is a tool that provides more powerful ways to measure and track your PSI scores than the basic functionality offered by Google. This is made possible by two key features.
Monitored URLs
Monitored URLs allow you to track a list of URLs and have them scanned automatically every day or week. Each URL is scanned in depth 3 times on desktop and 3 times on mobile to get an average score, which is a better reflection of the true grade rather than scanning just once.
Afterwards, you receive an email or slack notification if the URLs fall below the desired thresholds you set.
Full Site Scans
Full Site Scans provide the ability to scan your ENTIRE website instead of a random selection of pages. This means you can see the Google PageSpeed score for every single URL on your site and get greater visibility into your PageSpeed score across your entire domain.
Due to the much higher volume of URLs, each is only scanned once.
Automate PageSpeed Insights Tests - Step by Step
Ready to get started? In a few clicks, you'll have automation setup by following the steps below:
- Visit our homepage
- Enter your website URL
- Click Start Monitoring
- Enter your details to sign up
- The URL will be queued for scanning
- Enter some more monitored URLs or add your sitemap.xml URL to get a full site scan started.
Using the Data
The scan data is available in two formats:
Dashboards Our dashboard has nice charts to present the data in an easy to understand way. You can look at the overall site view or drill down to specific URLs and filter by date.
Google Sheets
If you want to perform your own analysis elsewhere, all scan data is also exported to a Google Sheet. From here it can be ingested into another tool and blended with other data to suit your reporting needs.
How it works
With Monitored Scans, you manually specify a list of URLs that you want to track in depth. PageSpeedPlus tests these multiple times every hour, day or week and notifies you if they are slow also measuring global loading times from 11 locations.
The other option is Full Site scans, where every URL in the sitemap.xml file has its pagespeed tested in bulk (we can even handle sitemap-index.xml files). These scans are less detailed and only test each page once. We don’t notify you about slow pages after full site scans. We just tell you the scan has completed and leave it for you to analyze in your own time.
In both cases, PagespeedPlus takes your URLs and runs them through the PageSpeed Insights API, which uses Lighthouse data. We test URLs on both mobile and desktop to provide total insight into the performance of a page. Metrics that you get back are the mobile score, desktop score, time to interactive, first contentful paint and first meaningful paint.
You can set the scan frequency and forget about it. From that point on we will test your URLs and notify you if they are slow. If you don’t hear from us, it generally means your PageSpeed Score is good. If you do then you need to take some action.
Benefits
There are many benefits to automating your Google PageSpeed Insights testing:
No need to manually test
The most obvious benefit is that it’s automated and therefore removes the need to manually test your pages. Some people can make manual testing work but with any sort of scale, it is impossible to stay on top of.
Save Time
Automated PageSpeed testing saves time over manual testing. PageSpeedPlus can test multiple URLs at once and store the results faster than any human can do.
Get alerts when your score falls
A typical notification email when low scores are found with monitored URLs
As PageSpeedPlus can run daily or weekly scans, you can track your score at regular intervals and take action when it drops. Compared to someone testing their PageSpeed manually once per month, PageSpeedPlus users have a significant advantage as they can react as fast when a new feature lowers their score.
No coding needed
PageSpeedPlus handles everything out of the box so there is no need for you or a developer on your team to write code. The only thing you need to do is provide it with a Google API key. After that, everything can be set up with a few clicks and then our automation takes over.
Clean UI
A primary goal of PageSpeedPlus is to measure PageSpeed scores at scale. On the flip side, that presents us with challenges in presenting that data at scale while still making it easy to digest without having to click around multiple sections of our tool. We’ve taken the time to build a friendly, simple and responsive interface that makes it easy to understand your scores across all sites. Central to this is the dashboard that lists all of your sites and the status of their Monitored URLs along with the average site score.
PageSpeed Insights History
From the moment the first scan runs, history starts building up which allows you to look back up to 12 months and see how your score changes over time. This is useful for debugging past issues and producing reports to show to stakeholders.
Build a culture of performance
Trying to improve PageSpeed is rarely the job of one department. It requires developers to build sites in performant ways, marketers to be conscious of the tags they place on a site and designers and content creators to use compressed images served in next-gen format. With PageSpeedPlus, you can bring these units together and give them the data they need in one place in an easy to digest manner and more importantly, understand when things change that require remedial action.
API
Automation doesn’t stop with our scheduled scans. Our API allows you to integrate the data into your tools, dashboards or build pipelines so it’s always available to everyone that needs to see it.
Google PageSpeed Insights vs WebPageTest vs GTMetrix
By landing on this blog, you are already aware of the benefits of fast websites but may be curious about why Google PageSpeed Insights specifically is important.
It’s widely known that Google places emphasis on web performance and rewards fast sites with good search rankings. PageSpeed Insights is a tool created by Google so when trying to establish exactly how Google grades your website speed, it is not difficult to conclude that they might use PageSpeed Insights ahead of the data returned by other tools.
For this reason, we optimize our sites to achieve a good score with this tool.
GTMetrix and WebPageTest are also big players in the speed measuring game but they differ from Pagespeed Insights(and PageSpeedPlus) in a few ways. They measure things from a purely technical perspective like raw loading time, page size, use of CDN, etc. PageSpeed Insights, on the other hand, measures the Performance, SEO, Accessibility and PWA features.
In other words, GTMetrix and WebPageTest measure raw loading time but PageSpeed Insights is more of an SEO/UX measurement.
Conclusion
You can measure your PageSpeed score manually but it is almost impossible to do this regularly and on enough pages that allows you to stay on top of your score in a meaningful way.
Automation and scheduling really is the only way to track your score and react quickly when it changes. These are the key features that make PageSpeedPlus stand out from other tools.
If you want to Automate PageSpeed Insights tests, consider using PageSpeedPlus.com.