PageSpeed Insights (PSI) reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices, and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved.
PSI provides both lab and field data about a page. Lab data is useful for debugging performance issues, as it is collected in a controlled environment. However, it may not capture real-world bottlenecks. Field data is useful for capturing true, real-world user experience – but has a more limited set of metrics.ย

Classifying Good, Needs Improvement, Poor
PSI also classifies field data into 3 buckets, describing experiences deemed good, needs improvement, or poor. PSI sets the following thresholds for good / needs improvement / poor, based on our analysis of the CrUX dataset:
Good | Needs Improvement | Poor | |
---|---|---|---|
FCP | [0, 1800ms] | (1800ms, 3000ms] | over 3000ms |
FID | [0, 100ms] | (100ms, 300ms] | over 300ms |
LCP | [0, 2500ms] | (2500ms, 4000ms] | over 4000ms |
CLS | [0, 0.1] | (0.1, 0.25] | over 0.25 |

Lab data
PSI uses Lighthouse to analyze the given URL, generating a performance score that estimates the page’s performance on different metrics, including:ย First Contentful Paint,ย Largest Contentful Paint,ย Speed Index,ย Cumulative Layout Shift,ย Time to Interactive, andย Total Blocking Time.
Each metric is scored and labeled with a icon:
- Good is indicated with a green check mark
- Needs Improvement is indicated with orange informational circle
- Poor is indicated with a red warning triangle
Audits
Lighthouse separates its audits into three sections:
- Opportunities provide suggestions how to improve the pageโs performance metrics. Each suggestion in this section estimates how much faster the page will load if the improvement is implemented.
- Diagnostics provide additional information about how a page adheres to best practices for web development.
- Passed Audits indicates the audits that have been passed by the page.
Thank you for reading this article, I really appreciate it. If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment.
Source:- https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/v5/about
3 responses to “PageSpeed Insights (PSI)”
Awesome article, I know that page speeds are useful, but never knew this detail information.
Thanks Atul, I really appreciate.
PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse indeed have alot of information that can help inform the performance of site from 0 to 1.