LaunchAudit vs Google PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is free, made by Google, and the authority on how fast a page loads. It is also the tool most people reach for when they mean "check my website", which is where the mismatch starts — speed is one of six things that can be wrong, and rarely the one that costs the most.
What Google PageSpeed Insights is good at
Stated first, and stated properly. If this section were not here, nothing below it would be worth reading.
- It is the definitive source on Core Web Vitals, because Google defines them.
- It reports field data from real Chrome users, which no third-party tool can fully replicate.
- It is free with no limits and no account.
- Its lab diagnostics are unusually detailed for a free tool.
Where they differ
| Aspect | Google PageSpeed Insights | LaunchAudit |
|---|---|---|
| What it looks at | Performance, with accessibility, best-practices and SEO scores from Lighthouse alongside it. | Security, SEO, performance, accessibility, conversion and trust, scored separately. |
| Exposed secrets | Not something it looks for — it is a performance tool, not a security scanner. | Scans served JavaScript and reachable files for live API keys and credentials, and masks them before storing. |
| Files that should not be public | Not in scope. | Checks a fixed, published list of paths — environment files, backups, dumps, version-control directories. |
| What you get back | A score and a diagnostic list, in the vocabulary of web performance. | A plain-English explanation per finding, plus the fix written out for a developer or for an AI editor. |
| Pages covered | One URL per run. | Crawls multiple pages in a single audit. |
Use Google PageSpeed Insights if…
If your question is specifically "why is this page slow", use PageSpeed Insights. It is better at that than we are, it is free, and it is the tool Google itself grades you against. We read its data too when you supply a key.
Use LaunchAudit if…
If your question is "is anything wrong with my site", you need the other five categories — and the one most likely to cost you money is the one PageSpeed does not look at.
Settle it in a minute
Both are free to try. Run ours on your site and see whether it finds something the other one did not — that is a more useful answer than any comparison table, including this one.