Google Lighthouse is a free tool by Google that assists you in increasing the quality of pages on your site. It allows you to see the performance of your website in association with the page speed and technical layout.
In this article, you will see how Google Lighthouse works and how to improve the Lighthouse Performance Score.
What is Google Lighthouse
Google Lighthouse calculates the performance of your site and provides you with a range of metrics. It gives you valuable insights to assist you in boosting the overall user experience.
The tool is quite easy to use and in a few seconds provides you with a descriptive report on all the significant Core Web Vitals information.
The focal point of the Lighthouse audit is Google’s Core Web Vitals. Google uses these metrics to calculate the speed of the web pages and the overall experience of the users. They comprise of CLS, LCP, and FID.
How Does Google Lighthouse Perform
The Lighthouse report comprises five different categories:
1) Performance
In this audit, Lighthouse calculates the speed at which the site is loading and the speed at which the users can access the site. It presents the performance for five-speed metrics:
· Largest Contentful Paint- It measures the time a web page takes to load its largest visible content for the users.
· First Contentful Paint- It calculates the time at which the first image or text becomes visible to the users.
· Cumulative Layout Shift- It calculates the layout shifts that take place when users try to access the page.
· Total Blocking Time- It calculates the time that a page is prevented from responding to user input.
· Speed Index- It represents how fast the content of a web page is fully loaded to the users.
Lighthouse then provides you the performance score based on the performance of your page for these metrics. The score will be provided for anything between 0 and 100. It also provides recommendations to improve the performance.
2) Accessibility
The accessibility tests evaluate how well your website is accessible to users with disabilities.
This report also provides you with a score out of 100 and shows you a list of opportunities to increase overall accessibility.
3) Best Practices
This audit verifies if your page is created on the recent web development standards. Further, it conducts a quick audit of widely accepted best practices for web development.
These best practices are associated with securing outbound and cross-links, using APIs, security-sing HTTPS, and showing images with the correct resolution.
4) SEO
The SEO score evaluates how closely your website page is attached to its best practices. It performs a test to evaluate your page for some technical attributes of the SEO. It shows you the SEO issues it discovered while performing an audit.
5) PWA
The PWA verifies whether your web or site application is using the recent web capabilities to deliver an optimal user experience.
How to Optimize the Lighthouse Performance Score
Let’s take a look at the various ways to optimize the Lighthouse performance on your site:
· Setup Page Caching is necessary for the optimization of your Lighthouse performance. It increases the server response time remarkably and assists you in improving the Largest Contentful Paint.
You can use RabbitLoader– a cache-based speed optimization plugin that helps in improving the page speed.
· Optimize the images, fonts, and code to make sure that you are not loading any unutilized Javascript files or any unrequired files that come in the way of your important content.
· Try to use a Content Delivery Network if you are operating in different countries. It is needed to make sure that you serve a better experience worldwide.
· Optimize browser caching to make sure that you are using the perfect strategies to handle static files in the browser.
· Eliminate unrequired CSS or Javascript files- If you are facing difficulties in increasing the Total Blocking Time and Time to Interactive, you need to look at the unimportant CSS and Javascript. Unrequired CSS and Javascript files are the main culprits that slow down the rendering of the page. If you are not able to deal with CSS and Javascript optimization, you should use RabbitLoader. It handles both of them and removes CSS as well as JS render-blocking.
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To Sum up
Page experience has become an essential factor for Google. It has also become important for site developers and owners. Fortunately, Google Lighthouse helps you to quickly evaluate the performance of your website, accessibility, and SEO in some easy steps.
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