Google runs a public exam for websites — it's called PageSpeed Insights, and anyone can test any site, for free. The exam is deliberately harsh: it simulates a cheap phone (a Moto G Power) on a slow 4G network — the worst realistic scenario, someone with shaky coverage on the road. It grades four things: speed, accessibility (can people with disabilities use the site), best practices and SEO. Out of 100 each.
This morning at 07:40 we took the exam. Here are the exact numbers.
Speed 90 out of 100. Accessibility 98. Best practices 100. SEO 100. The first letter appeared on screen after 2.9 seconds.
Ninety counts as «excellent» — much of the web lives far below that line. But Google's report contained one specific remark, priced at a full 2 seconds of waste: the fonts.
Like most websites in the world, we loaded our fonts from Google's servers. It looks innocent — until you see it from a phone on a slow network: before drawing a single letter, the browser has to make two extra trips to foreign addresses — introduce itself, request the font list, wait for the answer, then fetch the files themselves. Every trip on a slow network costs time. Total: about two seconds of blank screen.
The irony: our site is fast. Zero milliseconds of blocking, nothing jumps around while loading. We were simply waiting… for someone else's kitchen to deliver our letters.
The fix is simple to tell: the fonts now live with us. But we did it precisely:
Along the way we added one invisible signpost in the code — «the main content starts here» — which screen readers for blind visitors use to navigate. A tiny thing; it was exactly what kept accessibility at 98.
At 08:26 — forty-six minutes after the first exam — we tested again. The result: speed 100, accessibility 100, best practices 100, SEO 100. First letter: 1.5 seconds instead of 2.9 — nearly twice as fast, on the same slow phone and the same slow network. Blocking: zero milliseconds. Layout shift: 0.009 — to the naked eye, «nothing moves».
And in Google's new category — Agentic Browsing, which checks how readable a site is for AI agents — full marks, 2 out of 2. The grade is still experimental, but we take it to heart: as we told in the previous article, AI visitors are dear guests of ours.
Exam at 07:40 → diagnosis from the report → fonts brought home → the invisible signpost → deploy → new exam at 08:26 → 100/100/100/100. Forty-six minutes during which the site never stopped working for a moment.
Two things. First, if you have a website — test it: pagespeed.web.dev, it's free and takes a minute. The numbers you'll see are the same ones Google sees when deciding whom to show first.
Second — and more important: reaction speed is not luck, it's a way of working. In the morning we had a remark from Google; before noon we had a perfect score. Every project you tell us about gets the same tempo — see for yourself: tell the agent in the corner your idea.
PENTIMENTO