Let's talk about a free tool that can do wonders for your website's performance - Google Lighthouse. It's not some magical lighthouse by the sea; it's a free digital beacon that helps you navigate your website's optimization. So, if you're aiming for a better user experience and a higher rank on the Google search results, this tool might just be your guiding light.
What's Google Lighthouse All About?
Google Lighthouse is like your website's best buddy, offering powerful insights to level up your online game. With a simple Lighthouse report, you get a sneak peek into your website's page experience and, most importantly, some golden nuggets of advice to enhance its performance.
This versatile tool isn't just a one-trick pony; it's got multiple talents. It audits your web pages for performance, accessibility, SEO, and more, giving you valuable recommendations to work on.
The Fab Five Categories of Lighthouse Reports
Lighthouse's reports are divided into five main categories, like a five-course meal for your website's improvement journey. Here's what's on the menu:
Performance:
This category analyzes how fast your website loads and how quickly users can get to your content. It breaks down the speed into five metrics:
- First Contentful Paint (FCP): Measures the time at which the first text or image becomes visible to users
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Calculates the time a page takes to load its largest element for users
- Total Blocking Time (TBT): Measures the amount of time that a page is blocked from reacting to user input, like a mouse click
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures the layout shifts that occur as users access a page
- Speed Index (SI): Shows how quickly the content of a page is loaded
Accessibility:
Lighthouse's accessibility audits put your website through its paces to ensure it's user-friendly for people with disabilities. It checks important elements like buttons and links to make sure they're well described and even looks at alt-attributes for images so that visually impaired users can also get in on the action.
Best Practices:
Lighthouse focuses on assessing whether your webpage adheres to modern web development standards. During this evaluation, Lighthouse scrutinizes the following criteria:
- Confirmation of images displaying with the correct aspect ratio and suitable resolution
- Inspection of JavaScript libraries for safety, ensuring they are devoid of vulnerabilities
- Validation of the presence of the HTML doctype
- Verification of secure resource loading via HTTPS
- Verification of a browser error-free page
- Assurance of the absence of outdated frameworks and APIs
- Inspection for issues observable in the Chrome DevTools panel, including network request failures, security inadequacies, and other browser-related problems.
- Confirmation of user-friendly features like the ability to paste passwords into password fields.
- Evaluation of a seamless user experience by preventing geolocation and notification permission requests upon page loading.
- Validation of the page's character encoding, ensured by the meta charset tag.
SEO:
Lighthouse conducts a test to evaluate various technical SEO aspects of your webpage. More specifically, it verifies the following:
- Mobile-friendliness
- Validity of structured data
- Crawlability
- Presence of a valid hreflang attribute
- Configuration of title and meta description tags
- Presence of a valid "rel=canonical" tag.
- Indexability
- Validity of the robots.txt file
- Return of an HTTP 200 (OK) status response code
- Specification of image alt texts for images on the page
- Inclusion of a viewport meta tag with width or initial-scale settings
After scrutinizing these aspects, Lighthouse assigns a score on a scale of 0 to 100.
Progressive Web App (PWA):
In the past, this was the star of the show for Google Lighthouse. It checked if your website was a Progressive Web App, worked offline, and returned a 200 error. But now, it's just one of the five categories and might not be a game-changer unless you're in the PWA business.
So, if you're looking to enhance your website's performance, make it more accessible, secure, and SEO-friendly, Google Lighthouse is your go-to tool. It's like having a personal trainer for your website, guiding you to a healthier, more effective online presence. Give it a whirl, and let's light up your website's potential!