Google PageSpeed Insights
Description
Google PageSpeed Insights is a free Google service that measures how well a web page performs by running Lighthouse against it and reporting Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO scores together with the individual checks behind them. Web, SEO and development teams use it to find what slows a page down and what to fix first.
Setup guide
Follow this setup guide to connect Google PageSpeed Insights to Improvado.
PageSpeed Insights measures a page live, as it is at the moment of the request. It keeps no archive, so no setting can backfill scores from before you connected. Your history starts on the day of your first extraction and grows one measurement per page per run from there.
Click the Connections in the left navigation bar.
Categories on the Data sources page group all available platforms. Use a search to find the required one.
Click on the Google PageSpeed Insights tile.
Create a PageSpeed Insights API key in your own Google Cloud project. The key must be yours: the daily quota is charged to the Google Cloud project that owns it.
Sign in to the Google Cloud console and select the project you want to use, or create a new one.
Open the PageSpeed Insights API page and click Enable. A key from a project where the API is not enabled connects successfully and then fails every extraction.
Go to APIs & Services → Credentials, click Create credentials, and choose API key. Copy the key.
Click Edit API key to restrict it. Under API restrictions, select Restrict key and choose PageSpeed Insights API.
Leave Application restrictions set to None. Extraction runs from Improvado servers whose addresses are not fixed, so an IP address or HTTP referrer restriction blocks the connection. Restrict the key by API only.
Back in Improvado, fill in the connection form:
- Organization Name — a label for this connection, typically your company or website name. PageSpeed Insights has no account of its own, so this label becomes the account name for the extracted data. Keep it unique within the workspace so two connections never share an account name.
- API Key — paste the key you created in Step 3.
Click Connect. After the connection completes successfully, the Google PageSpeed Insights connection appears in your Connected sources list.
When the connection status is Active and the account status column shows your organization, you can move on to data extraction.
Choose what to measure. PageSpeed Insights cannot discover your pages, so every extraction carries its own settings:
- URLs — the full addresses of the pages to analyze, one entry per page.
- Strategies — the device profile to emulate: mobile, desktop, or both. Scores are not comparable between the two, so a page measured under both produces two separate rows.
- Categories — Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO. All four are selected by default. A category you deselect is not measured, and its score column stays empty.
Each URL and strategy combination is measured separately, so ten URLs on both strategies means twenty measurements per run.
To extract data from the connected source, follow the instructions on how to set up data extraction.
Schema information
The schema information shows all report types you can use to extract data from Google PageSpeed Insights.
Troubleshooting
The connection fails right after you paste the key. The PageSpeed Insights API is not enabled in the Google Cloud project that owns the key, or the key carries an IP address or HTTP referrer restriction. Enable the API (Step 3.2) and remove the application restriction (Step 3.4).
An extraction returns fewer rows than you have URLs. A page that PageSpeed Insights could not load or render is skipped, with no error row in the output — a redirect to a login screen, a page blocking automated clients, a slow-rendering page and a typo in the address all look the same in the result. Check the missing addresses at pagespeed.web.dev: a page that fails there fails in Improvado for the same reason.
An extraction stops partway through. Your Google Cloud project has run out of quota. See Limits.
Limits
No historical data. Every extraction measures your pages as they are at that moment. PageSpeed Insights keeps no archive of past measurements, so history begins on the day you connect and accumulates one measurement per page per strategy per run.
Quota. Google allows 25,000 requests per day and 240 per minute per Google Cloud project, counted against the project that owns your key. One URL measured under one strategy is one request.
Pages are measured, not discovered. PageSpeed Insights has no site list and no account of its own. The URLs, strategies and categories are settings on each extraction, and the Organization Name you enter when connecting is a label rather than an account fetched from Google.
Failed pages are absent, not flagged. A page PageSpeed Insights cannot analyze produces no row and no error row, so a short result means some pages failed rather than that data was lost.
Scores move with the Lighthouse version. Google updates the Lighthouse engine independently of the API, and the score composition can change with it. Each row records the version that produced it; compare scores over time within one version.
Release notes
You can find information about the latest API changes in Google's official PageSpeed Insights release notes and API documentation.
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