Page speed is simply how quickly your pages load for a visitor. TLDTrack measures your homepage with Google's PageSpeed Insights once a week, on both mobile and desktop, and charts the scores over time, so you can see at a glance whether your site is getting faster or quietly slowing down.
What it is
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Why it matters
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What it measures
Every time it runs, TLDTrack asks Google PageSpeed Insights to score your site and stores the four category scores it returns. Each is a number from 0 to 100, where higher is better:
- Performance. How fast the page actually loads and becomes usable. This is the headline speed score most people mean when they talk about "page speed".
- Accessibility. How well the page works for people using screen readers, keyboard navigation and other assistive technology.
- Best Practices. Whether the page follows modern web conventions, such as serving over HTTPS and avoiding known front-end mistakes.
- SEO. Whether the basic technical foundations search engines look for are in place, such as a title, a meta description and a page that can be crawled.
Alongside the four scores, TLDTrack also keeps the underlying speed metrics Google reports, such as how long the largest part of the page takes to appear, so a drop in the Performance score can be traced back to what actually got slower.
Mobile and desktop, measured separately
A page can be quick on a laptop and painfully slow on a phone, so TLDTrack takes the measurement twice on each run: once as mobile and once as desktop. That matters because the mobile score is usually the one Google leans on, and because most visitors now arrive on a phone. Watching both means a mobile-only slowdown, which is easy to miss when you only ever test on your own computer, still shows up on the chart.
How it works
Once a week, on Sundays, TLDTrack runs the homepage of each site that has PageSpeed switched on through Google PageSpeed Insights, for both mobile and desktop, and saves every result. Over time you build up a history rather than a single snapshot, and from that history you get three useful things:
- Where you stand today. The current scores tell you how the site performs right now, on each device.
- The direction of travel. The trend shows whether a recent change made things better or worse.
- An early warning. A gradual slide is easy to spot on the chart, long before it starts hurting your rankings or your visitors.
Watch the trend, not just the number
What slows a site down
Speed usually drifts for ordinary, fixable reasons rather than anything dramatic. The common culprits are:
- Large, uncompressed images. A single oversized photo added to a page can add seconds on its own, and it hits mobile hardest.
- A new plugin or script. Extra tracking, chat widgets or page builders each add weight the browser has to load.
- A heavier page design. More sections, fonts and animations all take time to render.
- A busier or overloaded server. As traffic grows, an under-powered host takes longer to respond.
Because TLDTrack keeps the history, you can line up a drop in score with the date something changed and narrow down the cause instead of guessing.
Turning it on
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1
Open the website you want to track from your Domains list. If you have not added it yet, see Add your first website.
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2
Go to the site's Performance tab.
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3
Switch on the PageSpeed toggle. Checks run weekly on Sundays. To take the first measurement straight away, press Run mobile + desktop now. You can run one extra check by hand each week.
What you will see, and what to do
Open a site and you will see its current PageSpeed scores for mobile and desktop alongside the chart of past measurements. If the lines are flat or climbing, there is nothing to do. If you see a clear step down, look at what happened around that date: a new plugin, a redesign, a big image, or a change of host. Fix the likely cause, then watch the next few measurements to confirm the score recovers. If speed is drifting for reasons you cannot pin down, the wider SEO Health audit often surfaces the specific blockers that are holding a page back. And to make sure the site is actually loading in the first place, pair this with uptime monitoring, which watches how quickly the page responds around the clock.
A score is a guide, not a grade
Where to set this up
Open a site to see its speed scores.
Learn moreA deeper overview of speed monitoring.
Good to know
- Every run records both mobile and desktop, and four scores each: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO.
- Measurements are taken once a week, on Sundays, so the value is in the trend rather than any single check.
- PageSpeed is a per-site toggle, so you can watch speed on the sites that matter and leave it off on the ones that do not.
- PageSpeed is a lab test run by Google PageSpeed Insights. To see the same vitals measured from your real visitors, install the tracking snippet and see Core Web Vitals from real visitors.
- For the wider picture of what is helping or hurting your search performance, see the SEO Health audit.