We’re all looking for ways to make life a little easier when it comes to optimizing websites for SEO (search engine optimization) and providing a high-performing website with an excellent user experience. With the free tool Google Lighthouse, we may have just found it.
What is Google Lighthouse?
As explained by Google, Lighthouse is “an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages.” It runs audits on the page requested and then provides you with a report on how well the page has done. As well as telling you what you can improve, it also tells you how to improve it. The reports are broken down into five categories: performance, accessibility, SEO, best practices, and progressive web app. We explore the details of each of these below.
Performance
This report looks at the speed of a web page, how it loads and displays, whether it’s ready for users to view and interact with, and how it can be enhanced for a greater user experience.
Accessibility
This
category helps you view your website through the eyes of someone with disabilities.
It concentrates on how accessible your website is, an example being whether there are
descriptions of images (alt text) for people with visual impairments. Alt text
is read aloud by a screen reader, to help the user visualize the images on a
page.
SEO
Tests are administered to see how easily your web pages can be crawled by Google bots, to be indexed and displayed on Google’s search results pages.
Best Practices
This section focuses on the security of your website and whether or not your website is following the modern standards of web development.
Progressive Web App (PWA)
PWA addresses whether your website offers the best of both worlds – being a website but feeling like an app.
Your Google Lighthouse Performance Score
Google Lighthouse also gives your website a score out of 100. Because Google’s ranking algorithm changes frequently, it’s recommended you use Google Lighthouse throughout the year to keep up with updates and changes. This score allows you to see what can be done quickly to make the user experience of each page better, and therefore rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). After implementing any changes, you can use Google Lighthouse to conduct another page audit to see if your score has improved.
About the Google Lighthouse Speed Test
The ingenious thing about the Google Lighthouse speed test is that it’s run using
an unsteady 3G connection. The reasoning behind this is that most people don’t
have an amazing 5G or even 4G connection. If the test was conducted under those
conditions, the results would likely not be very accurate. Your report might
state that you have an amazing load speed while your average user on 3G has already gone back
to the SERP after impatiently waiting for your website to fully
load.
Google Lighthouse is a fantastic tool that will help you discover how well your website is performing. Take what your reports find and implement the advice for a better functioning website, improved user experience, and SEO.
Trust Americaneagle.com to Optimize Your Website
Optimizing your website and ensuring it’s constantly operating at its full potential isn’t a “one and done” kind of affair. However, with Google Lighthouse, you can run audits throughout the year to make changes and updates as necessary. At Americaneagle.com, our digital marketing services include Google Lighthouse audits as well as recommendations on how to improve your website. We can even implement those recommendations for you. Additionally, we have a dedicated search engine optimization team who can help your website rank higher. Contact us today to find out more and get advice from our team.
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