Why we measure mobile and desktop separately
Mobile traffic dominates small-business visitor sessions — StatCounter tracked it at 60–65% globally through 2025. Desktop catches a different class of issues. Desktop visitors typically arrive on a fast wired connection with no slowdowns. They also load render-blocking scripts and large images that only show up at wider screen widths.
Averaging the two into a single performance number hides the failure mode that matters most: a slow mobile experience quietly absorbed by a fast desktop average. We split them so neither hides behind the other.
The mobile profile
The mobile score uses the standard mobile profile published by Google as part of the Core Web Vitals programme — the same simulation Chrome’s built-in developer tools apply when you switch the device picker to mobile.
- Device: a typical mid-range phone (Moto G4 screen size and identification)
- Network: slow 4G — about 1.6 megabits per second down, 750 kilobits per second up, 150 millisecond round-trip latency
- Processing speed: simulated as 4× slower than a typical desktop, to match a mid-range phone
These are the same numbers any developer would see running the same checks on their own machine, so the score we report is directly comparable.
The desktop profile
The desktop score is measured on a typical office screen with a fast wired connection and no artificial slowdowns — what your desktop visitors actually experience.
- Screen: 1024×768, the typical office monitor
- Network: no slowdowns
- Processing speed: full speed (no slowdown)
How performance contributes to your overall AuraWatch score
Mobile performance contributes 5% to your overall score. Desktop performance contributes another 5%. That is a combined 10% — the same weight performance carried before we split it — but distributed so a slow mobile score actually moves the needle instead of being averaged away.
The remaining 90% covers security findings: known security flaws, SSL/TLS encryption quality, open-port and exposed-service results, configuration-leak checks, forgotten subdomains, and web-application checks. Performance is part of your overall health, not the whole story.
Coming soon: more device profiles
The two profiles above are what every plan gets today. Higher tiers will soon let you pick additional device and network profiles — for example a current-generation phone on 5G, or an older phone on slow 3G — so you can match the profile to the audience that actually visits your sites. On Enterprise, you will be able to supply custom profiles for cases where the standard ones do not fit.
See the pricing page for what is available on each tier today, and the features page for the rest of what we check.