Pagespeed insights limitation

[Roger Hsu]

Hi,

The PSI is really a cool tool that helps us a lot to adopt best practices regarding page performance. However, I found there are some limitations preventing us to fully utilize it:

1. Http basic authentication for non-prod environment: We would like our frontend developers to use the tool when they make a change in staging/preview environments which are not publicly accessible. Make non-prod page to public temporarily is not a viable solution for us. The turnaround time would be too long if we can only find any page performance issue in production pages.
2. Embed cookie strings: A lot of our pages require user login. Without embedded cookie string, it seems impossible to test those pages
3. I can get some metrics such as page size by calling PSI api. I am wondering if I can also get something like page load time, domContentLoaded time and number of DOM elements.
4. Is it possible that I can upload my har to get the same psi report (so I can solve my non-prod or login-page issues)

I am also looking at some other tools such as webpagetest and GTmetrix. But they all have pros and cons:

1. GTmetrix is very close to current PSI, since it uses PSI 1.12.16 under the hood. It also allows users to setup http auth and cookie strings and provide some metrics such page load time, page size...etc but no domContentLoaded time. However, since its PSI engine is very old, the rules are quite different from current PSI rules, there is no mobile rules and its scoring is kind of "off" - we consistently get more than 80 with lots rule violations while the same page only gets 60ish in current PSI.  And it probably won't get any update if Google stops publish the PSI source codes.
   
2. We can install WPT on promise so non-prod is not an issue. We can also setup cookies to bypass login. It also provides all the performance metrics that we need. But it only tests with 6 rules and most important rules such as critical rendering path are missing.

Could any one from PSI share us some insights such as the roadmap of this project? The source codes in github stop updating since 2012. Is there something big coming out (even a commercialized version)? I just hope the Team can include some of the features that I mentioned and it could become the perfect tool.

Thanks

Roger

[ladisl...@auto1.com]

Would be actually more convenient if Google would create a Chrome Extension similar to YSlow, that could work with any site, even the once that requires login. 

[Jeeves Shackleburton]

On Tuesday, May 10, 2016 at 3:35:46 PM UTC-4, Roger Hsu wrote:

Hi,

The PSI is really a cool tool that helps us a lot to adopt best practices regarding page performance. However, I found there are some limitations preventing us to fully utilize it:

1. Http basic authentication for non-prod environment: We would like our frontend developers to use the tool when they make a change in staging/preview environments which are not publicly accessible. Make non-prod page to public temporarily is not a viable solution for us. The turnaround time would be too long if we can only find any page performance issue in production pages.

I'd really like to see this.  I tried the obvious "http://user:pass...@example.com" method and that did not work.

I have no desire, or even ability, to open my staging site to the world.