It’s been pretty quiet on the update front for SpeedFactor in the past months. Mostly bug fixes and performance updates.
That’s why we’re excited to give you a sneak preview of the major SpeedFactor update coming soon!
Overview
SpeedFactor started as an exclusive Google Lighthouse wrapper and report generator. Over time, we have added more features, more audits, all of them without a Lighthouse dependency, but based on Simulated User Monitoring. We kept Lighthouse up to date, and added the latest Core Web Vitals, but also updated our internal tools to calculate more and better metrics.
What’s changing in this upcoming release?
Lighthouse (and PageSpeed in general) offer suggestions and opportunities based on their audit. We are removing these features, as they are now available on demand in the Chrome browser. Moreover, SpeedFactor’s auditing model doesn’t really suit displaying suggestions and opportunities from a day-old audit.
Google Lighthouse
The next release will focus on improving the display of Google’s Core Web Vitals, and better displaying everything grouped on the data provider.
CMS Metrics
This feature has long been in development and it depends on a plugin or on a blank file in your website’s root. This metric will show the overall speed of your content management system and will provide advice on caching or speeding up your server software.
This feature will work with any hosted CMS, be it WordPress, Drupal, Craft CMS or a static, flat-file CMS.
New PRO plans are coming
This update to SpeedFactor also comes with new changes to our PRO plan offering.
We haven’t updated our PRO plans since we introduced them in 2019. Taking user feedback into account through our feedback surveys and usage analysis, we’re upgrading our plans to suit all types of web performance enthusiasts and agencies.
Free audits? You bet!
SpeedFactor started free (while in beta), then turned to paid plans only. While this keep being the case with the new update, the free audit will be featured more prominently on the homepage and will contain more valuable metrics.
Other updates, tweaks, improvements and enhancements
Google is really pushing performance as a ranking flag, so, as page speed and user loading experience gets more attention, we are streamlining our metrics to only show what’s essential to your site. We’ll collect more technical information about site in order to provide better metrics and better technical advice.
