PageSpeed Insights and cloudflare's speed test give totally different results

Cloudflare's test says the homepage is fast, pagespeed insights says LCP is over 4 seconds on mobile. Same page, same afternoon. Which one should I trust when deciding what to fix first?
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williammarketing Nov 09, 2026
nora.jones
also check whether one of them is getting a cached copy and the other isn't. purge the cache, then run each test twice back to back. the first run after a purge is often the slow one.
lila_seo Oct 14, 2026
nora.jones
they're not measuring the same thing, so they'll never line up. PSI's lab score is a simulated run on a throttled mid-range phone from Google's own servers, and the numbers at the top of the report (if your site has enough traffic) are real-user data from Chrome over the last 28 days. Cloudflare's test runs from their network with its own settings. If you want one number to care about, use the field data / Core Web Vitals section, since that's what Google actually uses. The lab scores are for debugging, and they wobble a few points between runs anyway.