Page speed budgets: catch slow releases early

What it is

A Speed budgets card under Page speed: each budget with its target, the last 7 days from real visitors and whether it is within or over. Add one in a few seconds; a daily check adds an alert to your inbox when a budget is missed.

Why it matters

A new image carousel or a heavy script can make every page slower without anyone noticing. A budget turns “the site feels slow” into an alert on the day it starts, with the number that changed.

How it works

1. Add the page-speed add-on (Page speed card) so real visitors’ load times are counted as daily totals.
2. Add a budget: pick LCP, INP or CLS. For the whole site set the 75th percentile you accept, such as 2.5 s for LCP or 200 ms for INP. For a group of pages, such as /blog/, set the most poor loads you accept, such as 10%.
3. Every day quietstats works out the last 7 days from the totals you already have. When a budget goes from within to over, one alert appears in Alerts.
4. Budgets need at least 20 measurements before they are judged.

Set it up

Nothing to set up: it works with the standard one-line script.

<script data-host="https://quietstats.co.uk" data-dnt="true" src="https://quietstats.co.uk/js/script.js" id="YOUR_SITE_ID" async defer></script>

Privacy: what is and isn’t collected

Collected

• Nothing new: built from the existing daily page-speed totals (bucket counts per day and poor counts per page)
• No single visit, visitor ID or timing is stored

Never collected

• Cookies, localStorage or anything else stored on the visitor’s device
• IP addresses or user agents (used in memory, then discarded)
• Anything that links a visitor across days (the visitor ID resets daily)

How quietstats works, and the legal caveats →

Rows and limits

• Whole-site budgets use the 75th percentile, estimated within exact Core Web Vitals buckets
• Page-group budgets use the share of poor loads, because per-page totals keep good/poor counts only
• Up to 12 budgets per site; checked once a day; alert emails are off
• Rows: 1 per budget; the daily check writes only when a budget changes state; 1 + 1 per page-group budget reads

“Rows” are database rows written, which is what our hosting is billed on. Reads are not rows written. Methodology →