The danger of relying on your Google PageSpeed Insights score to measure web performance

I’ve stopped paying attention to my Google PageSpeed Insights score.

When I first focusing on web performance, my score would go up as my page speed when down. That’s good. It got my start render time down to 1 second. Over the last year, I started implementing advanced techniques to bring my start render time down to around 500ms. These caused my score to start going down.

Currently, my Google PageSpeed Insights grade is the worst it’s ever been, and my site is faster than ever.

Don’t ignore PageSpeed Insights altogether, but do take the score with a grain of salt. The analytics from Web PagTest are far more valuable and meaningful.