How Good Is Google lighthouse? And Reasons to Use It More Effectively

by Cynthia Mercileen - 11/16/2020 5781 Views

Google lighthouse is one such tool that helps save a lot of time for you to assess the performance of your website and make it even better

Are you asking yourself ‘What is the best audit tool I can use to check my site’s performance? If you work on your web performance, chances are you have already heard about Google lighthouse. Well, if that’s not the case, don’t worry; you will appreciate why it’s an absolutely needed tool for testing and improving web performance after reading this article. Google lighthouse is an open-source tool from Google that analyzes the performance of web pages. Though its focus is web apps and mobile sites, it still offers a lot of useful info and recommendations which can make any site better.

Google lighthouse

Google lighthouse is one such tool that helps save a lot of time for you to assess the performance of your website and make it even better. You can visit the page and simply enter your URL into Google lighthouse; it will audit the site for performance issues and also create a separate report for each case. You will also find ways to rectify each in the report. In result page audit, a Google lighthouse score of 90-100 means good results. 50-89 is average, and 0-49 is poor. According to Google, scores above 90 ranks you in the top 5% of well-optimized websites.

Let’s get started with Lighthouse!

Everybody, you and I want quick results in the internet when we search for anything. We can't or simply don’t have the time to wait more than a few seconds. Can you recollect closing a tab just because it isn’t loading fast? You are not alone; 53% of mobile users leave a site if it takes any more than 3 seconds. So the solution is clear to attract people to read your page is making web pages load quickly. And, that is where Lighthouse comes to play.

So, what is Google lighthouse?

Google lighthouse is an Open Source audit tool that helps increase the quality of applications and web pages. Audits are performed in a few key areas like accessibility, performance, Progressive Web Apps and best practices. It gives you an idea of possible user experience and developer tailback in those domains.

The ultimate idea is to boost loading speed. And if you can enhance the speed, performance is going to really improve.

In this article, we show you a complete guide to Google lighthouse, Google lighthouse score its benefits, features, usage, and more!

Who should use it?

Developers and non-technical audiences can use Google lighthouse in various ways. You can also use it to enhance your site.

How to Install Lighthouse?

Since you know what it is, let's now take a look at the three easy ways to install Lighthouse.

1) Chrome

This is the easiest methods to run Google lighthouse. You can use it in Google chrome app, without downloading anything additional.

Lighthouse app

To use Lighthouse on Google chrome, simply follow these basic steps:

Go to the website or webpage you want to run the audit on
Then right-click and click on 'Inspect', or hit the F12 key to open Chrome Dev Tools.
Click on the Audits tab and choose the important details you wish to run.
Click on 'Run audit’ to run the report and see your Google lighthouse score
Doing so, set off Lighthouse to show the audit report of the page.

2) Google chrome Extension

One of the advantageous yet simple methods for running the Lighthouse is through the Chrome Extension from the Web Store.

The extension lets you to rapidly run the tool on the webpage without opening a different tab or opening the developer apps.

Just click on the Lighthouse button present in the toolbar.
To use the Lighthouse on Google chrome extension simply follows the steps here:
Download the Lighthouse extension from Chrome’s Web Store and add it to your Google chrome program.
Search the website or webpage you wanted to review.
Then click on the Lighthouse symbol on your toolbar, and let the tool run.
Once the process is completed, you can see and check results, Google lighthouse score for your site on another Chrome window.

3) Node Command Line Interface (CLI)

Google lighthouse can be accessed on the Node.js node module or command line as well.

This is a considerably more dedicated approach and is apt for individuals who wanted to automate Lighthouse.

To run in Node.js CLI:

Install the Google chrome browser:
Install a current and stable variant of Node.js
Run the command line to download and install the general Lighthouse npm bundle to Node.js: pm install lighthouse
Once successfully installed, you can run the tool by composing the associated direction into the CLI: lighthouse https://airhorner.com/

What are the Metrics used to analyze a Website?

Google lighthouse gives a split-up of your website into the accompanying metrics:

Performance
Best Practices
Accessibility
Progressive Web Applications
SEO

Google Lighthouse Metrics

Performance:

Lighthouse Performance Metrics

The perspective of Lighthouse on performance is primarily focused on the user’s perception of speed rather than actual speed. In other words, how quickly things show up on the screen. It verifies the following metrics: Speed Index, First Contentful Paint, Time to Interactive, First Meaningful Paint, Max Potential First Input Delay and First CPU Idle. These have a huge part in making things appear on the screen as fast as possible, thus improving the user experience.

Search Engine Optimization:

Lighthouse SEO Metrics

Lighthouse will check that if web pages are optimized for SERP. It checks some best SEO practices, like whether the docs have a valid robots.txt file, uses legible font sizes, and use status codes and page tags. Most of these Search Engine Optimization tests are quite basic. Note that the Lighthouse team is working to expand and improve the SEO audit.

Best Practices:

Lighthouse Best practice Metrics

For this, Google lighthouse checks pages to make sure they are following the best practices for the web. Some of these include checking if a page is accessible over HTTPS if applications have no errors logged to the console, if geo-location access is requested, and if images displayed are with the correct aspect ratio.

Accessibility:

Lighthouse Accessibility metrics

For this audit, Lighthouse checks the user-friendliness of your web page. It checks if the <html> element has a lang attribute if images have alt attributes if the document has an <title> element if foreground and background colors have adequate if contrast if the viewport is viewer-scalable, and link names work.

Progressive Web Application:

Lighthouse PWA metric

Lighthouse will check your webpage counter to a set of principles which defines progressive web apps. This doesn’t give a Google lighthouse score to your webpage, but a pass or fail depending on whether your page meets the criteria or not.

Reasons to Use Google lighthouse:

Now that you know exactly what it is and the different ways to use it: Why should you prefer this particular site auditing tool over the so many testing tools out there? Why experts in white label digital marketing agency recommend this?

To give you a direct answer, let me share some key reasons why we use it on our clients’ sites and even on our website:

It is very easy to use: why not do a deal with this ease of use tool that also gives accurate audit results. When you can have both, why not take advantage of them?
It is developed by Google and not just a third-party testing tool.
It is fully automated.
It is open-source
It also tests how the websites look and do on mobile devices. That’s like extra icing on your favorite cake!
Its user-centric metrics provides what the point of optimizing a site, and the risk of losing sight of the user expectations is?

Whether you are:

building a new site
optimizing an existing website

Check how well its web pages perform by running a Google lighthouse audit.

In short, this scoring system and suggestions of improvement from Lighthouse make the best “indicator” for us to improve our site’s user experience:

Take Away!

When you care about your website’s performance and work actively to improve it, you already have an advantage. Fortunately, Google gives us access to a bunch of tools that can make the job effortless. Lighthouse is such tools. If you are eager to put in the time and the necessary efforts to keep improving your site, the sky is the limit. Hopefully, this article has given you a better idea of how to use Lighthouse more effectively and the reasons to use it! Use it improve website speed, mobile functionality, and accessibility all whilst making acclimations to pledge that your website meets the accepted procedures in site composition. If you are new to SEO, it is best advised to work with a white label digital marketing agency. Here at Submitinme, we are happy to help your business grow better!

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SEO News

Tags :

seonews,googlelighthouse

About Cynthia Mercileen

Hi, I’m happy to have you visiting my post. I work in Submitinme as a Content Writer. I constantly look out for and love to write about the latest trends in SEO and Digital Marketing. I’m a passionate writer, as I love everything I do. This quote, ‘The only way to do great work is to love what you do’ from Steve Jobs, is something I totally believe in. I set goals for myself and thrive on challenges consistently. So I have something to strive towards always. I am never happy with settling on something, and I always look for a chance to achieve .... more info about the author