What is measured - and what is not
The test makes one real request from our server and times each part of it: the DNS lookup, the TCP connection, the TLS handshake plus the server’s own processing, and the download. That gives the time to first byte (TTFB) - the point before which nothing on the page can appear. It then reads the HTML for what slows rendering: scripts and stylesheets that block it, images without dimensions, missing compression, oversized pages and third-party domains.
It does not report Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS). Those come from a real browser rendering the page, ideally real visitors on real phones, and any number computed from HTML alone would be a guess. The report links straight to Google’s PageSpeed Insights for those.
What good looks like
Google’s guidance is a TTFB of 0.8 seconds or less; over 1.8 seconds is poor. The fastest sites serve cached HTML from a CDN close to the visitor. If your TTFB is slow, the usual fixes are page caching (so the server does not rebuild the page on every request), a CDN, and a faster database query or host. Remember that one test from one location is a sample - run it a few times.
Quick wins
- Turn on Brotli or gzip compression for HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
- Add
deferto scripts in the head. - Set width and height on every image, and lazy-load those below the fold.
- Serve images as WebP or AVIF - the image compressor converts them.
- Use HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 - usually a single setting on the host or CDN.
Checking on-page SEO as well? Run the SEO checker, and the security headers checker for the server side.

