Pagespeed Checks

Lighthouse tests measure the speed of your pages. Among other things, the performance, SEO, Accessibility and Best Practices are checked. Bolstat can monitor your websites or web apps daily and alert you on any measurement changes.

Create Check

1. Click the “+ Add Check” button and choose “Pagespeed Test”.
2. Enter the website URL which we should check.
3. Choose if you want to do a simple URL check or if you want to add advanced authentication steps.
4. Adjust your preferences to your liking. E.g. dekstop vs mobile, locations to check, etc.

Settings

Advanced Browsing Session

The default “Direct Page Load” will just load a URL and execute the pagespeed test. This is not sufficient for pages which need additional interaction before testing. For example a web app which is behind a login form. With “Advanced Browsing Session” you can define browser interactions, just like browsertests, to execute before starting the test.

Device

You can choose between a desktop and a mobile device for test execution. Compared to the desktop environment, the mobile device has smaller screen settings and is throttled back more in terms of resources. With the “adjust” link it is possible to configure your own CPU, bandwidth and latency preferences.

Automation & Locations

Pagespeed tests are daily monitored by default. You can choose if you want to execute them from one location or from multiple around the world. The advantage of testing from one location is that geographical differences in performance are easily noticed in your averages scores. But multiple locations give you a much better global view on your site performance.

It’s also possible to only manually trigger a pagespeed test via the dashboard or via API. This could be useful for QA purposes.

Alerts

After creating a check, it’s possible to adjust alert settings. This allows you to configure your notification preferences. By default you are alerted when the performance score is significantly changed. But you could also alert on changes in the total page size or the number of downloaded files, etc.

The Lighthouse Report

All your pagespeed scores are extracted from Lighthouse generated reports. Lighthouse is an open source pagespeed tool designed by the Chrome team and also used by Google to calculate pagespeed. To view all details and improvement recommendations, click on the test in the “Pagespeed tests” in the details page.