Speed Tester Version 4.3: Help Documentation, Guardian Enhancements, CrUX Graphs, and More
Approximately two months after concluding version 4.2, we have completed version 4.3 of our website speed monitoring tool. We've added help documentation to enhance our audience's understanding, integrated Guardian into the Summary report, displayed specific Metric values, and made further interface improvements.
Most changes apply to both the free version and the professional PLUS tests.
First, let's delve into the major updates.
Web Speed Help and Speed Tester
PageSpeed.ONE’s mission includes improving awareness of web speed through lectures, meetups, and articles.
The PageSpeed.ONE help is now complete.
Our agency blog was no longer sufficient for publishing educational texts, so we sought a better tool. We chose Docusaurus, a static site generator specialized in documentation.
The result can be seen at pagespeed.one.
We’ve moved not only general texts about speed metrics like INP, LCP, or CLS, but also texts on techniques and technologies related to speed, such as BF cache or arguments Why Focus on Speed.
We are now planning to prepare help for the monitoring tool itself, starting with the Summary report.
Stay tuned, as we will be publishing at an even faster pace than before.
Display of Specific Values in Domain Speed Trend Graphs
This change delights our consulting agency because we track the speed trend data from Google (Chrome UX Report, abbreviated as CrUX) in the Domain report during optimizations almost daily.
Now, it’s possible to switch this graph from distribution (the metric value spread among users) to a single number (Google's 75th percentile):
Unlike a distribution graph, here you see the value by which Google actually evaluates your site in terms of Core Web Vitals. It’s far simpler.
Will you check this as often as we do?
Guardian Integrated into the Summary
The Guardian report is a popular feature of our PLUS tests. Recently, the team from Slevomat expressed their appreciation:
The tool is excellent. We check it daily due to INP. Guardian notifications are configured via Slack and recently alerted us to a bug we missed.
We have now slightly enhanced the basic output of the Guardian report—a table with monitored metric values—and integrated it into the Summary report, where you can see the status of all site metrics.
Rotation and Expansion of Monthly Metric Trend Tables
When measuring speed, we are interested not only in short-term data—whether we see positive or negative speed impacts from changes—but also in long-term data over months.
For this, we use tables that download long-term metric trend graphs from Google's data.
These tables have now been significantly revised. They are sorted vertically by domain like other reports, and on desktop displays, the table is always expanded to avoid horizontal scrolling.
Easier to read, ideally all green.
(Thanks for the improvement tip, Ondřej Ilinčev.)
Full Metric Value in Result Tables
It might not happen to you as often as it does to us, but... sometimes we just need to see the non-rounded metric value.
Now everyone has this option, as we've added it to the tooltip displayed when hovering the mouse.
Twice 2.5 seconds with different colors? Mystery solved.
This is very useful when tracking metric changes at several decimal places (wink at INP).
It also addresses situations where metric values appear the same but have different colors, as seen in the image.
User Interface is Now Slightly Less “Iconic”
At the start, I mentioned our mission to educate. This also applies to the interface of the tester. Not everyone knows Metrics, and not everyone knows the difference between CrUX and synthetic. Speed measurement is quite complicated.
The tester interface is still full of help icons, but we’re starting to reduce them with the launch of the Help section.
This small improvement simplifies the user interface:
Fewer icons, emphasis on data remains.
It's a bit simpler and more straightforward. This is the direction we’ll continue with, further simplifying the UI for everyday users.
Other Minor and Internal Tasks
Like all software developers, we’ve been hunting bugs and tweaking our environment to work efficiently:
Bug Hunt
- Bug: Cannot open test detail in the free version
- Bug: Notes not visible in all graphs
- Bug: URL for Slack disappears in Settings after saving
- Bug: Copying URL to clipboard not working
- Bug: Anchors do not scroll to graphs
- Bug: Seasonal changes after switching from another test
- Bug: CrUX for domain with minimal scale
- Bug: Values overlapping in CrUX graph for domain
Internal Tasks
- Fine-tuned error catching via Sentry
- Bug: Broken atoms/Link component
- Bug: Cannot add test to super admin dashboard
- Collecting 403 errors during website testing
- Bug: Sentry SequelizeDatabaseError
- Code cleanup
- Simplification of creating PLUS tests
- Agency Blog: Enabled SEO 😅
We appreciate any feedback on the speed tester and, of course, bug reports. Write to us at info@pagespeed.cz or directly in the app chat.
And what will we do next?
We’re already hard at work on version 4.4.