Google PageSpeed Insights: accelerate your site for better SEO

When we launched our BeBranded website, our first obsession was to make it visible on search engines. After all, the speed at which a website loads is a key factor in SEO and user experience. So how do you improve your search engine ranking and how do you use (and understand) Google PageSpeed Insights?

Let's take a step-by-step look at how this tool works, how to read each score, and how to fix the most common problems it reveals.

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Why site speed is essential for SEO

The speed and overall structure of your site is a key factor for your SEO. These metrics will ultimately improve your ranking, as search engines favour fast-loading sites in their results. What's more, a fast, efficient site gives your visitors an optimised experience, reducing the bounce rate and increasing the time spent on the site.

Since 2021, Google has formalized this requirement through the Core Web Vitals, three official metrics (LCP, CLS, INP) that are part of its ranking factors. And in 2026, speed matters beyond Google: AI answer engines also favour sites that are fast and technically clean when they choose which sources to read and cite.

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What is Google PageSpeed Insights?

Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool developed by Google to help website managers analyse and optimise their pages. It analyses the content of a web page, then generates suggestions for making it faster and more effective.

The tool provides two types of data, and the distinction matters. Lab data is collected in a simulated, standardized environment: it is useful for diagnosing technical problems and comparing before/after an optimization. Field data (the Chrome User Experience Report) reflects what real visitors actually experienced over the last 28 days, on real devices and real networks. When the two disagree, trust the field data: it is what Google uses for ranking.

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How does it work?

Google PageSpeed Insights is a very easy-to-use tool, so all you have to do is enter the link for the site you want to analyse. For this article, we're going to use our own site https://www.bebranded.xyz/, wait a few seconds and your report is ready!

You'll see a detailed report with 4 on-screen scores ranging from 0 to 100, available for both mobile and desktop versions. Let's take a look at these 4 criteria together and understand each key point.

Performance score

This score takes into account 5 main metrics:

• First Contentful Paint (FCP): measures the time taken for the page to display the first piece of content.
• Total Blocking Time (TBT): the total time the main thread was blocked, preventing user interaction.
• Speed Index: shows the speed at which a page's content is visually displayed.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): records the time it takes for the largest piece of content on the page to load.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability, indicating how often page elements move during loading.

In the field data section, you will also see INP (Interaction to Next Paint), which measures how quickly the page responds to clicks and taps. INP replaced FID as a Core Web Vital in March 2024.

The aim of this tool is to understand where the problems come from and, above all, how to solve them, which can be found just below.

In this section you can easily identify the important points to change. Here we can see that we have 1 opportunity which could save us just under a second (which is not to be underestimated)! By clicking on each item, you can quickly see which elements are blocking the process and how to solve these problems.

There is often an explanatory page shared under each point, which is often a great help in understanding how to solve the problem. You can also directly ask an AI to identify the problem and find a solution, depending on your no-code application.

Accessibility score

This score assesses the extent to which your page is accessible to users with specific needs, such as those who use screen readers or have navigation difficulties. A high score indicates that your site is well designed to be accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. The accessibility score is based on a number of criteria, such as:

• Text legibility
• Keyboard navigation
• Correct use of ARIA attributes
• Colour contrast
• Presence of alternative text for images

Please note that there are manual actions to check, as Google PageSpeed Insights is not able to analyse all elements on its own.

Best practices score

This score reflects your site's compliance with best practice standards for web development. A high score means that your site follows generally accepted recommendations for creating a secure, high-performance and reliable site. This score takes into account aspects such as:

• Page security (e.g. use of HTTPS)
• Absence of obsolete plugins
• Good coding practices
• Performance and efficiency of script loading

Search engine optimization (SEO) score

This score assesses the ease with which search engines can understand and index your page. A high score indicates that your site is well optimised to appear in search results. SEO in PageSpeed Insights focuses mainly on the technical aspect of SEO, such as:

• The presence of meta tags (title, description)
• The HTML structure (correct use of headings, H1, H2, etc.)
• Mobile-friendliness
• The presence of a sitemap file and a robots.txt file

For the complete list of technical points to verify on your site, our SEO checklist goes through them one by one.

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How to read your score

Each of the four scores uses the same colour scale. Here is how to interpret it:

Two important nuances. First, mobile scores are almost always lower than desktop scores, because the test simulates a mid-range phone on a slower network. Since Google uses mobile-first indexing, the mobile score is the one to prioritize. Second, chasing a perfect 100 is rarely worth the effort: the goal is to be solidly in the green on the metrics that matter (LCP, CLS, INP), not to win a benchmark contest.

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The most common fixes (and how to apply them in Webflow)

Across the hundreds of reports we have analysed, the same opportunities come up again and again. Here is how to handle them, especially if your site runs on Webflow.

Oversized images are the number one cause of poor LCP scores. Compress every image before upload (our free Image to WebP converter does this in seconds), resize files to their actual display size, and keep lazy loading enabled for images below the fold, never on the hero image.

Render-blocking resources and unused JavaScript come next. In Webflow, enable Minify CSS and Minify JS in the hosting settings, clean up unused styles and interactions, and audit your third-party scripts: every chat widget, heatmap or tracking pixel you add weighs on the performance score. Load what you keep asynchronously.

Layout shifts (CLS) usually come from images without dimensions or from custom fonts loading late. Define explicit sizes on media elements and preload your primary font.

Finally, keep an eye on overall page weight: heavy pages also consume bandwidth, which has a direct cost on Webflow. Our guide on optimizing Webflow bandwidth covers this in detail.

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Go faster with AI

PageSpeed Insights tells you what is wrong, but its recommendations remain generic. A practical shortcut: take a screenshot of your report (or copy the text) and give it to an AI assistant like Claude or ChatGPT. Ask it to rank the issues by impact and to explain how to fix each one on your specific platform. What was a list of technical jargon becomes a prioritized action plan, with concrete steps adapted to Webflow, WordPress or whatever you use. We use this workflow at the agency and it regularly turns an hour of investigation into ten minutes.

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What is the benefit?

Google PageSpeed Insights gives everyone detailed information about the loading speed of your website. With just one click, the 4 criteria show you where your site stands and how to improve it. What helps us on a daily basis at BeBranded is that PageSpeed Insights does not just highlight problems, it also provides concrete suggestions for improving your site's performance. Finally, the tool is free and easy to use even for non-experts, making it accessible to a wide range of users looking to improve their website's performance.

At BeBranded, using Google PageSpeed Insights is an integral part of our commitment to providing websites that are not only visually incredible, but also perform well and are optimised for SEO. If you're looking to improve the speed and performance of your website, we're ready to provide you with our expertise and bespoke solutions for maximum impact.