Search engines are playing a vital role to reaching your customers. The higher the ranking on the search engine means more of the potential customers seeing your web page in their search. Everyone trying to rank their web page heard about SEO(Search Engine Optimization), but it is not the only thing impacting the rank. Performance, best practices and accessibility impact it as well. To measure every aspect of the web page – there is a free tool integrated into the Chrome browser called Lighthouse.
What is Lighthouse and how does it work?
Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages by analyzing their performance. You can run it as desktop or mobile test against any web page – public or requiring authentication. It has audits for performance, accessibility, best practices, SEO and progressive web apps.
Any web page that is crawled by a search engine is evaluated by performance, accessibility, best Practices, SEO and progressive web apps and it does affect how well your web page is ranking on the search engine.
Each of these are judged on a scale 0 to 100:
- Performance is judged on how fast your web page loads.
- Accessibility is judged by how accessible your web page is for people who might require to use accessibility technologies such as screen reader.
- Best Practices are judged by the “health” of code, for example, using deprecated Libraries/APIs or asking for special permissions while not being on secure HTTPS connection would drive the score down.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is judged by making sure the page is optimized for search engine results. This includes a lot of things, but mainly it checks if header, meta names exists, images have descriptive names etc.
- PWA (Progressive Web Apps) does not receive a score, it is either there or not. This is still a rather early technology but makes websites run faster on repeated views.
Lighthouse is an important tool because it can identify common problems that affect the quality of your web pages and propose solutions for them.
You can run the test on Chrome browser by pressing F12 on your keyboard and selecting the Lighthouse tab.
Achieving perfect score is not that hard…
Above is the test ran on the front page of my portfolio. I am really happy to achieve it, but was it hard to do it?
No, it can’t be easier! Lighthouse shows exactly what is causing the issue and probable solution for it. Once you solve it – run the test again and see the score going up.
If you are looking for a website optimized for performance, best practices, accessibility and SEO, contact me – I would love to help!