What is a Poor Desktop Score?

What is a Desktop Score?

A desktop score measures the performance of a website that was meant to be visited on a desktop or laptop. The score comes from Google's PageSpeed Insights and is a weighted average of a variety of metrics including (but not limited to): First Contentful Paint (FCP), First Meaningful Paint (FMP), Speed Index, First CPU Idle, Time to Interactive, and Max Potential First Input Delay. These metrics can also be found on the WatchTower Performance tab of each website in your account.

What Causes a Poor Desktop Score?

Poor desktop scores can result from images, webfonts, or large files that are causing the application to lag or slow down.

How Can This Be Resolved?

A number of actions can be taken to prevent or fix a poor desktop score. Consider minifying large CSS files and removing extraneous code. Sometimes, resizing or encoding images can have a huge impact on your site's speed as well. To understand a site's performance rating in more depth, check out our guide on Understanding Site Performance.