Site Speed Check: Lighthouse results without the noise

How JWWD built a free speed test that runs Google’s Lighthouse audits and explains the results in plain English, without the wall of charts or the premium upsell.

The problem

Page speed affects search rankings, conversions and whether visitors stay long enough to read anything. But most performance tools sit at one of two extremes.

Some are overwhelming, with waterfall charts and metrics you’d need a course to interpret. Others are oversimplified: your site is slow, upgrade to find out why. Business owners and developers both needed something in between.

What we built

Site Speed Check runs a Lighthouse audit through Google’s PageSpeed Insights and presents it clearly:

  • Mobile and desktop: both audits run in parallel, so you can switch between them without waiting for a second scan.
  • Score and metrics: a performance score with First Contentful Paint, Largest Contentful Paint, Total Blocking Time, Cumulative Layout Shift, Speed Index and Time to Interactive.
  • What to fix: opportunities such as unused CSS and JavaScript, render-blocking resources and image savings, plus diagnostics, each rated good, average or poor.

How it's built

  • Our own PageSpeed API key: Calling the API without a key lands in Google’s shared anonymous pool, which is effectively always out of quota. The key lives only on the server and never enters the repository.
  • Fail honestly: If the API is unavailable or the key is rejected, the visitor gets a clear message and we get a log entry, rather than a confusing half-result.
  • A 15-minute cache: Lighthouse scores for the same page barely move in 15 minutes, so repeat checks are served instantly without spending quota.
  • Limits budgeted for real use: Per-visitor limits count each mobile and desktop request separately, so someone working through a list of pages doesn’t hit a wall mid-session.
  • A global circuit breaker: An hourly ceiling sits well under the daily API quota, so even a flood from many addresses can’t exhaust it for everyone.

Measuring what can be measured honestly

Site Speed Check also publishes a report on how Australian websites are delivered. A Lighthouse run takes 10 to 30 seconds and spends API quota, which rules it out for every .au domain in the Tranco top million list.

So the report measures what can be measured directly and completely instead: time to first byte, compression, HTTP version, transfer size, redirects before content and caching headers. Those are causes rather than symptoms, and a site owner can act on every one. The report states plainly that it doesn’t use the homepage tool’s Lighthouse engine.

The result

A free speed test that gives business owners an answer they can understand and developers the detail they need, with no signup or credit card. Performance has been a focus of ours from the start, and this is the tool we’d want to hand a client. See the Site Speed Check tool page for a quick overview.

Have a project like this in mind? Talk to JWWD.