Honest comparison
When this audit is the right tool — and when it isn't
There are four ways to get from a slow page to a fast one. They solve different jobs, and pretending otherwise would violate our own no-padding rule — so here is the comparison we would want as buyers, including the cases where you should not buy from us.
Option 1 · free
Do it yourself with free tools
PageSpeed Insights, Chrome DevTools and WebPageTest's free tier give a senior engineer the raw material: lab runs, field data, waterfalls. The adjudication, the field↔lab diagnosis and the falsification work are then hours of skilled labor — and proving a fix before shipping is a paid tier even at WebPageTest.
Choose it if: you have senior web-performance skills and the hours to spend — this is genuinely the right answer for you.
Not the tool when: you need the verdicts this week, or your time costs more than the audit.
We publish free tools and open research for exactly this path.
Option 2 · monthly subscription
A monitoring platform
RUM monitoring products watch your site continuously: dashboards, alerts, and real-user INP attribution. The mechanics: install a JavaScript tracking snippet, pay monthly, and wait for enough traffic to accrue before the data speaks.
Choose it if: you ship often and need to catch regressions over time — monitoring is a genuinely different job, and after your fixes ship it is the natural next investment.
Not the tool when: the question is "what exactly should we fix, right now?" — a dashboard measures; it does not adjudicate or write your fixes.
This audit runs on Google's own field data — no snippet on your pages, nothing to install.
Option 3 · $3,000–$8,000
A human consulting engagement
A specialist spends weeks with your site and your team: broader scope, bespoke depth, and a human presenting the findings in a workshop call. Typical engagements run $3,000–$8,000 and 2–4 weeks.
Choose it if: you need site-wide architectural work, organizational buy-in, and a person your team can question — that service model is worth its price.
Not the tool when: the problem is one money page and the budget or calendar doesn't stretch to an engagement.
Same evidence standard here, executed by an engineered pipeline instead of billable hours.
Option 4 · $497 one-time
This audit
A one-time adjudicated diagnosis of one URL: every PageSpeed warning tried — Real, Wrong, Trivial or Locked, with evidence — plus the findings no free report contains (the Silent Bottleneck, your CDN's live settings, the named plugin or app), platform-native fixes with predicted ranges, and 2 re-runs to hold the report to its predictions. Delivered in less than 24 hours.
Choose it if: you have a page that makes money, you want verdicts and code rather than raw data, and you want them this week.
Not the tool when: you need continuous monitoring or a weeks-long human engagement — see options 2 and 3; we will not pretend to be either.
The honest sequence for most sites: fix the page first (options 1 or 4), then monitor (option 2). If this audit's report says your page is already fast, it says so — we never pad.