Overview Dashboard and Health Scores

When you first click into a Site Speed project, you’ll be taken to the Overview Dashboard. On the left-hand side of the top part of the dashboard, you’ll see the overall site speed health score and the score trend over time. Underneath that, you’ll see the category health scores that make up the overall health scores.

The health scores provide a mark out of 100 for specific areas of your website’s speed performance. This helps you identify key areas for investigation to drive improvements and increase conversions. The health scores are generated every time a crawl completes.

For Site Speed, the category health scores are aligned to the Lighthouse performance metrics:

• First Contentful Paint (FCP), which measures the time from when the user first navigated to a page, to when any part of that page’s content (text, images, <svg> elements, or non-white <canvas> elements) is rendered on the screen.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures the render time of the largest image of text block visible in the viewport, relative to when the user first navigated to the page.
• Total Blocking Time (TBT), measuring the total amount of time after FCP where the main thread was blocked for long enough to prevent input responsiveness. Note that this also correlates well with First Input Delay (FID) which is a field metric measured in Core Web Vitals.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which is the measure of the largest burst of layout shift scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifecycle of a page.
• Speed Index Score, which measures how quickly content above the fold is visually displayed during page load.

How the Health Scores are Calculated

Health scores are calculated from Lumar reports which are considered to be errors. All scores start at 100, then the errors are deducted to form a final score. If there are too many errors, the health score may show a value of 0 and, conversely, if no errors are found then the health score will be 100.

Each report is assigned a weight, and the category's weight is determined by the sum of the weight of all reports classified as issues within the category. For the Site Speed metrics, these weights come from the Lighthouse performance reporting which is why, unlike with SEO and accessibility, they cannot be changed.

Health Score Errors

To the right of the Overall health score, you’ll see the top site speed errors that are impacting the health scores. In this section, you’ll see the issue count alongside the report title, with the average time or size savings available, and a trend line for the last few crawls. Clicking into one of these errors will take you to the report for that issue.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Underneath the category health scores, you’ll see key performance indicators for each of the Lighthouse performance metrics with bars in the graphs colored red for slow, yellow for moderate, and green for fast (or Poor, Moderate and Good for CLS). This helps you identify spikes, or negative trends that can be addressed before they seriously impact conversions and potential revenue. Hovering your mouse over the chart will reveal the data point for each crawl.

Trend Charts

Underneath the KPIs you’ll find a trend chart for each of the KPIs, broken down into Slow (red), Moderate (yellow) or Fast (green) pages (or Poor, Moderate and Good for CLS). If you hover over the chart, you can see the data point for each breakdown, and for each crawl. You can also click on the legend below the chart to remove some data points (e.g. removing Fast to only fous on Moderate or Slow pages).

To drill down into the detail, simply click on the relevant data point within the chart to view the full Analyze report. For example, if you click on the most recent data point for Slow pages in the FCP chart, you’ll be taken to the Slow FCP Pages report for the most recent crawl.

Category Dashboards

In addition to the overview dashboard, there are also dashboards for the five Lighthouse performance metrics. You can access these by using the left-hand navigation, or by clicking on the category health score on the main dashboard.

When you view the category dashboard, the top part will be the same as the overview dashboard, but specific to this area. On the left-hand side, you’ll see the health score and trend line for that specific area, and on the right-hand side you’ll see the top issues specific to that area.

Underneath the health score and top issue, you’ll then see the KPI trend graph that’s on the overview dashboard, the detail of the latest crawl in a pie chart broken down into Slow, Moderate or Fast. Below these, you’ll also see the trend chart for this area, which also appears on the main overview dashboard.

The category dashboards give you the opportunity to drill into a specific area to get a better understanding of what’s happening on your site. Again, clicking on the report titles in the errors list, or one of the data points in a chart, allows you to drill down further and view the full report in Analyze.