Documentation

# Overview

PageSpeed Plus is a tool for monitoring Google PageSpeed Insights scores on a website and running scans in bulk across the entire website.

This is is not an official Google product. It is an external service built around V5 of the PageSpeed API, which is powered by Lighthouse

# Account Setup

Setting up your PageSpeed Plus account is quick and easy by following a few simple steps.

Create Account

Before getting started with PageSpeed Plus, you need to create an account. Click here to open the registration page. All accounts come with a 14 day completely free trial.

Logging In

If you already have an account you can log in to the PageSpeed Plus backend by clicking Login on the homepage or clicking here.

# Add Site

  • Go to the dashboard and click Add Site
  • Give it a name
  • Enter the homepage URL
  • Add a tag if you wish
  • If you want to receive notifications, activate the slider
  • Click Add

The homepage will now be measured with the PageSpeed Insights API.

Once a scan finishes you can view the full contents of the report from your dashboard.

# Full Site Scan

To run a full site scan, go to the website overview page and click Edit. Then enter the URL for your sitemap file and click save. A scan of all URLs will now execute. Large sites can take a while to process. When finished an overall average for the site will be calculated and individual URL break down will be available in the report.

Please note that full site scans only measure each page once on mobile and once on desktop. They are lighter than monitored URL scans, which measure each page three times on mobile and three on desktop to get an average


Automated

After the initial site setup, a full site scan runs once per week. You will receive an email with the results each time and the full report can accessed from the site details page.

On Demand (Pro plans only)

You can also run full site scans on demand by clicking the Scan Full Site button from the site details page

# Monitored URLs

PageSpeedPlus can scan your important URLs quickly on a daily basis and notify you if they are slow.

Add URLs

To have a URL monitored, add it to the monitored URLs section

  • First, set the scan frequency
  • Paste the entire URL into the URLs section
  • Configure the notification settings

Automated

The URLs will now be scanned at the frequency you specified and you will receive an email if they are slow.

On Demand (Pro plans only)

You can also run monitored URLs scans on demand by clicking the Scan Monitored URLs button from the site details page

Slack Notifications

You can also receive notifications via slack.

  • First create a Slack Webhook Url
  • Go to the settings page in your account
  • Enter a slack web hook URL you want us to notify

Microsoft Teams Notifications

You can also receive notifications via Teams.

  • First create a Teams Webhook URL
  • Go to the settings page in your account
  • Enter the Teams URL you want us to notify

Chart Annotations

Annotations can be added to chart at specific locations. Example use cases are to mark when a new feature went live so it’s easier to visualise the before and after score.

To add an annotation, click any area on the chart and give it a description.

Once added, annotations will show a small blue triangle on on the chart at that location. 

To update or delete an annotation, click the small blue triangle to open the edit modal.

Monitored VS Full Site Scans

Monitored URLs are in depth scans that measure a wide range of things multiple times to give an average score that is more representative of real world behaviour. Full Site Scans measure less things and only take one reading.

Monitored URL Scans Full Site Scans
Number of Scans 3 1
Global Load Times
Screenshots
Field Data

# Cache Warmer

Cache Warmer visits URLs to prime the cache and allow the page to be fast for real users.

If you have a standard plan or higher, it can be accessed in the site settings.

Dashboard

To trigger cache warming in the dashboard:

  • Go to the website settings in your account.
  • Open the edit page and scroll to the cache warming section
  • Choose a warming frequency
  • Choose a scope, Monitored URLs or Full Site
  • Click Update


API

To trigger Cache Warming via the API:


Cache warming runs in a single region. If you wish to execute in multiple regions, contact us about an enterprise plan.

# Excluding From Analytics

The PageSpeed Insights API executes javascript when testing URLs so every time a page is scanned on your site, it will be treated as a real visitor and log a hit in your analytics. You may want to exclude this traffic from your analytics to prevent your data being skewed.

There are three ways this can be done:

  • URL Parameter

    • A parameter can be added to URLs every time a request is made by PageSpeedPlus. In the the Full Site Scans section, enter the desired parameter without a ? symbol. For example: referrer=pagespeedplus

    You would then exclude traffic with this parameter in Google Analytics.

  • User Agent

    • You can ignore our User Agent, which is:

    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/106.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 PageSpeedPlus/1.0.0
  • IP Address

    • You can ignore our IP address from your Google Analytics. (This is available upon request if you create a support ticket.)

      Manage Users

      PageSpeedPlus accounts are designed for team use. The email address used to sign up initially becomes the admin. Users can be managed by clicking the Team dropdown in the top navigation and then Team Settings.

      Adding Users

      Enter the email address of a user to be added, choose if they should be an admin or regular and click add.

      An email invite will be sent, which the user needs to accept. The new user will have access to the master team account and also a second team account created under their profile, which they are the admin of.

      Switching between teams can be done in the Team dropdown in the top navigation.

      # Troubleshooting

      If your scans are not working, here are some steps to troubleshoot:

      Scores not returned for some pages

      If no score is returned, first check if the webpage can actually be processed by PageSpeed Insights. Some pages cannot be scanned by the PageSpeed Insights API because they have errors or bot blocking in place. As we use that API, we will be unable to return data for those pages either.

      Secondly, if the score is close to 0, the PageSpeed API will return nothing

      Scans stuck in queued state

      Users on trial or basic plans have shared queues with other users. You can wait in line or upgrade to get access to a personal queue.

      Fill Site scans not working

      Check if your sitemap.xml file is working.

      Scans stopping half way through

      Scans are limited according to your plan. Check our pricing to see the breakdown.

      If you still have questions, contact us from the support section of your dashboard.

      # API

      PageSpeed Plus offers an API so you can integrate data from your account into other tools and dashboards.

      Our official API docs with accompanying code samples for PHP, Node, Python, Java, Ruby and more are hosted by Postman.


      Create Key

      You will need to create an API key on your settings page to access your scan data.

      Making A Request

      This api_key must be added as a Bearer Token on all requests to the API.

      curl --location --request GET 'https://app.pagespeedplus.com/api/sites' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer XXXXXXXXXX'

      Replace XXXXXXXXXX with the generated API key.