What Is Google Lighthouse and How Do We Use It?

What Exactly Is Google Lighthouse?

Google Lighthouse is a free Google service that assists you in improving the quality of your website's web pages.

The tool examines your pages for performance, accessibility, SEO, and other factors. And make tips to help you enhance these aspects.

It is free and open-source software that anyone can use on any website.

Google Lighthouse can assist you in improving the overall experience and performance of your website.

We'll go through how Google Lighthouse works and how you can use it to audit your web pages in this post.

Let's get started.

How Does Google Lighthouse Function?

Google Lighthouse works by assessing five major website optimization criteria.

1. Effectiveness

Lighthouse examines how rapidly a website loads and how quickly people can access it in this assessment.

It reports on your performance for five-speed metrics, each of which measures a different component of page speed:

• First Contentful Paint (FCP): The time it takes for the first text or image to be seen to users.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Determines how long it takes a website to load its largest element for viewers.
• Total Blocking Time (TBT): The amount of time a page is prevented from responding to user input, such as a mouse click.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Calculates the layout shifts that occur as users navigate through a page.
• Speed Index (SI): Indicates how quickly a page's content loads.

Lighthouse assigns a page an overall performance score depending on how well it performed across all measures. The score can range from 0 to 100.

A score of 90 to 100 shows that your page is well-optimized for user experience.

Anything less than 90 indicates that a large number of resources on your page are slowing things down and harming the overall page experience.

Lighthouse also makes recommendations. Which you can use to boost your performance.

2. Availability

The Lighthouse accessibility test evaluates how well users of assistive devices can navigate your website.

It specifically examines items such as buttons and links to determine how well they are explained.

It also examines photos to determine if alt text has been given. As a result, viewers with low or no vision who use screen readers comprehend what the graphic is about.

The accessibility report, like a performance audit report, assigns a score out of 100. The better the score, the higher the score.

The tool also suggests ways to increase your general accessibility.

3. Recommended Practises

Lighthouse's best practices assessment determines whether your page adheres to modern web development standards.

Lighthouse investigates whether:

• HTTPS secure servers are used to load resources.
• All photographs are displayed with the proper aspect ratio and resolution.
• All JavaScript libraries are secure and free of security flaws.
• The HTML doctype is used on this page.
• Cross-site scripting (XSS) assaults are mitigated by Content Security Policy (CSP).
• There are no browser problems on this page.
• There are no deprecated frameworks or APIs on this page.
• The source maps on this page are correct.
• The page is devoid of flaws that appear in Chrome DevTools, such as network request failures, inadequate security measures, and other browser difficulties.
• The meta charset tag specifies the character encoding for the page.
• Users can paste their passwords into the password field on this page.
• By preventing geolocation and notification permission requests on page load, the page provides a positive user experience.

All of these elements contribute to your final score of 100.

The best practices Lighthouse report also emphasizes specific elements that require your attention. Which can help you increase your score.

4. SEO

Lighthouse performs a test to analyze your website for some technical SEO factors.

It specifically checks to see if:

• Your site is mobile-friendly.
• The structured data on this page is correct.
• Internal links can be crawled.
• The hreflang attribute on this page is correct.
• The title and meta description tags have been set.
• This page is searchable.
• Robots.txt is correct.
• The HTTP status code 200 (OK) is returned by the page.
• The "rel=canonical" tag on this page is valid.
• Plugins have no effect on the page content.
• Descriptive language is used to introduce links on a page.
• Image alt texts are set for images on a page.
• A viewport meta tag with width or initial scale specified exists on this page.

After that, it assigns a score out of 100.

It also indicates any SEO concerns discovered during an assessment.

However, the tool does not provide a complete view of your SEO.

If you want your website to rank higher in Google, you must optimize it for all areas of SEO.

You can also see particular problems influencing your performance.

The tool provides advice on how to resolve each issue discovered.

Resolve each issue that the programme identifies for your site. As a result, your website's SEO remains in good shape.

5. PWA (Progressive Web App)

Lighthouse's PWA audit evaluates whether your web application makes use of contemporary web capabilities to give an ideal user experience.

It determines whether your web app is:

• Mobile networks are fast and reliable, and offline functionality is available.
• Installable on a variety of devices, it includes features such as offline functioning and push notifications.
• PWA optimized by switching HTTP traffic to HTTPS, setting a custom splash screen, shrinking web page content to fit on mobile displays, and following all of Lighthouse's other best practices.

To keep up with the Google Update cycle for its search engine, Hocalwire CMS features a carefully curated collection of settings that are automatically updated. We provide mobile SEO implementation as part of our standard packages as a service to our clients. To learn how Hocalwire may assist in transforming your current codebase into a beautiful mobile experience, Schedule a Demo right away.