Differences between Pagespeed Insights and Core Web Vitals

Hello, dear reader!

Very often, looking through projects on Upwork (my profile: link), I see orders “To improve the speed of Core Web Vitals”, “To Make Core Web Vitals 90+”, and so on. I concluded that the client does not understand the difference between Core Web Vitals, Pagespeed Insight, and site speed measurement. This may happen, for example, because Core Web Vitals is integrated into the Pagespeed Insight analytical system. Pagespeed Insight is considered a speed measuring site because it contains the word “Speed” and so on. This article should help the site owner understand the difference.

What is Pagespeed Insight

This is a set of recommendations from Google that allows the site owner to find problematic points. For example, non-optimized fonts, scripts, styles, and images. Absence of caching, compression, delayed loading, etc. Pagespeed Insight is not an instrument that determines the speed of a site. This is a tool that allows you to identify several errors on the site, some of which are described above. Pagespeed Insight is measured from 0 to 100 and scores for desktop and mobile versions. According to the assessment, the site page falls into one of three zones: red, yellow, and green.

The Pagespeed Insight score is set for each page of the site and may differ for the homepage, category, individual post, or page. A score of 100 does not guarantee that the site has become fast. A score of 100 only shows that the site is maximally optimized for the requirements of Google Pagespeed. By the way, Google’s site does not have a maximum score of 100.

What is Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals is a site quality index that consists of three parameters: Largest Content full Point (ISP) – measurement of the loading time of the largest content element (for example, the largest picture); First Input Delay (FID) – measurement of the time after which the user can interact with the content; Cumulative Layout Shift (CS) – offset of layout elements (for example, a website is loaded and one of the images shifts all the content down when loading).

Core Web Vitals has two values – “test passed (green)” and “test failed (red)”. Thus, the Pagespeed Insights Score – measured from 0 to 100 and indicates to the owner improvements in the field of scripts, styles, images, etc. Core Web Vitals – indicates three parameters that the site owner should work on, and the measurement result is “passed the test” or “failed the test”. Hopefully, understanding the differences between Pagespeed Insight and Code Web Vitals tools will allow you to better understand the tasks that you set for a web developer. Good luck!