Google Lighthouse is one of a few go-to tools we use to understand a number of website factors important in ensuring a site has the best chance of ranking well in the search engines.
As with everything SEO related, we take all these tools with a pinch of salt, nobody can tell you that having a Google Lighthouse score below 100, or even below 80 will stop your website ranking, but there are plenty of great insights you’ll get from this free tool and some scores you should be taking notice of.
What is Google Lighthouse
Lighthouse is a service by Google which can be accessed in a number of ways – from the browser tools in Google Chrome, from a Node.js command line, programmatically or the easiest option, from the web.dev website
By entering your website URL, the service will virtually load the site, collecting information along the way to give you detailed information on the following subjects.
Performance
How fast your website loads through various stages, some of which are quite technical and relate not just to the speed of the server your website is hosted on, but any code that’s potentially blocking the website from loading quickly.
Accessibility
Judging how accessible your website is for users, including things like fonts and text sizes, the contrast of background and foreground colours, image tags and other elements that ensure the widest range of people have a good experience with your website.
Best Practice
Scoring your website on what Google considers to be the best-practice for any website including elements such as image size/ratio, bad Javascript code, whether the browser is logging errors with the site code and has a valid security certificate right through to whether your website would stop a user from pasting a password into a form field.
SEO
This section covers more of the basics you would assume most websites have in place including page titles, meta descriptions, whether links are crawlable, have descriptive text and the site has a valid robots.txt file through to even checking if the server returns a valid HTTP code.
Is the Lighthouse score important?
When thinking about the importance of a high score, it’s best not to assume that the score itself is being recorded and taken into account by the search engines but instead think about each of the sections and how that could be affecting the ability for a search engine to crawl your site and the visitor to use it.
For example, you could have a high performance score but if your website takes 3 or 4 seconds to load there’s a good chance the search engines will penalise you and an even greater chance that visitors will hit the back button before they’ve had a chance to see your website.
On the flip side, your website could get a mediocre score but by quickly loading for the user and if they go on to spend time on your site and convert, there’s no doubt this will help with your progression up the rankings.
How easy is it to improve your score?
Making changes to a website in order to improve the Lighthouse score will depend on a number of factors including your own ability, your technical resource, your hosting provider and the CMS system you’re using.
Performance is probably the most challenging section since most of the items relate to the various stages it takes to load a website. For example, even if you understand what First Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive are, you may well be restricted by your hosting server.
Accessibility and the SEO sections can be quite straightforward and most of the items will be related to the content you or your webmaster has put into the CMS itself. Changing font sizes, content readability and image attributes is something almost all businesses should have access to change.
Best Practice can be a little trickier and will probably need someone quite technical to look at javascript, the use of CDNs, caching, SSL certificates, etc. but shouldn’t be something that most CMS systems stop you from doing.
What’s a good score?
It would be easy to say anything over a score of 80 is considered good but, as we said before, the focus should really be on each element itself and the impact it will have on the user’s experience. A great user experience is going to be favoured far more than your overall score.
Ultimately, you’re not likely to ever get a score of 100 which is fine. It’s not uncommon to find that fixing one thing reduces your score in another area or highlights a new issue – Lighthouse recommendations can often contradict themselves.
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