95+ on PageSpeed: what the 4 numbers mean (and what they don't)

When I tell you your website will score 95 or more on all four PageSpeed Insights numbers, I owe you an explanation of what those four are. Otherwise they’re just numbers that sound nice. And a number you don’t understand is a number you can’t check.

The four numbers, plainly

• Performance. How fast the page appears on an average phone over a slow network, how long it takes to react when you touch it, and whether things jump around while it loads. The hardest of the four, and the one your customer feels first.
• Accessibility. Whether the site is comfortable to use for someone with low vision, reads with a screen reader or struggles to tap small buttons. Text contrast, descriptions on images, proper labels on forms.
• Best Practices. The technical health of the page: a secure connection, no errors in the background, no outdated browser features, images at the right dimensions.
• SEO. The basics Google needs to understand the page: a title and description, links it can follow, a page that reads properly on mobile and isn’t locked away from search engines.

Each number goes from 0 to 100. 90 and above is green, 50 to 89 orange, below 50 red.

Why 95 and not 90

90 is the green threshold, so I could promise that. But the number moves a few points from one measurement to the next, even if nothing on the site changes. A site at 91 may show 88 tomorrow. A site at 96 almost always stays green.

And so you know where 95 sits in practice: when we measured 210 local business websites on mobile, only 23 reached it on Performance.

What a good score does NOT mean

This is where most of the exaggeration happens, so let’s be precise.

• It doesn’t put you first on Google. The SEO score checks that Google can read your page. In the regular results, your position depends mainly on your site’s content. On the map, mainly on your Google Maps profile and your reviews. Anyone who promises you the top spot is promising something they don’t control.
• It doesn’t bring customers on its own. A fast site that says little is still a site that says little. Speed does something simpler: it stops you losing the people who already come.
• 100 on Accessibility doesn’t mean fully accessible. The automated test catches part of what matters. The rest needs a person to try the page. If you need accessibility for the law or for a grant, read what actually applies.
• It doesn’t stay that way forever if you add third-party tools. A chat, an advertising pixel or an embedded booking widget loads its own code from its own servers, and the number can drop. I don’t hide it: before you add something like that, I tell you how much it will cost in speed, and you decide.

Don’t believe it because I say so

PageSpeed Insights is a public Google tool. At handover I give you the report with the four numbers, but you don’t need to rely on it. Open pagespeed.web.dev, type the address, stay on the Mobile tab and run it whenever you like. The check is yours, not mine.

Want to see where your own site stands today? Send me the address and I’ll send you the four numbers, explained in plain words.