What actions you should take from Google Lighthouse? — Björn Darko // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “Google Lighthouse is a free tool, an app you can add to your Chrome browser. It measures the performance of the URL. It emulates a mobile device, 4G, for example, and then emulates a user h-end and it gives you performance accessibility, best practices, and SEO and progressive web apps.” -Björn

• “So essentially, Google Lighthouse is a way for you to take a webpage, your URL not at a domain level but a specific page and understand how Google views its performance not just for SEO but just broadlyhow Google thinks about the acumen of that page.” -Ben

• “I think performance is the most important in the Google Lighthouse report. What it actually measures, is, for example, the first content for paint. It measures in seconds and the first content forpaint actually measures the time from navigation to the time when the browser actually renders the first bit of content from the document object model.” -Björn

• “The first meaningful paint is essentially the paint after which the biggest above the foldlayout change has happened and what fonts have loaded, for example. Thats actually the first time, a user really sees the content.” -Björn

• “As soon as the user can actually scroll or press on a button, thats the time to interact. Then, there is an overall speed index which is the overall page load performance metrics that shows you how quickly the contents of the page are populated, so the lower the score the better, of course.” -Björn

• “The score is from 0 to 100. Thats the overall score and the higher the score, the better. But for speed index, its of course, the lower the score, the better.” -Björn

• “Its different from various industries but I have seen sites who have a score of 90. But the average one I would say is between 60 and 70. If you are on 80 or 90, you are already really, really good.” -Björn

• “One thing is called render-blocking resources and these are resources whichare blocking the first paint of your page so the fast page load resides in the high-end user engagement, more page views and then conversion of course.” -Björn

• “So basically, you can go to a re-prioritization exercise to put all the things that are required for first paint to start boosting that score, so Google gives you more credit in performance.” -Ben

• “Accessibility highlights opportunities to improve the accessibility of your web application. The important thing here is that you do manual testing also. The guidelines Ive said are based on the so-called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the WCAG 2.0.” -Björn

• “The Web Content Accessibility Guidelinessay that a website needs to be perceivable that a user can actually perceive the content, operational so that user can actually use the UI/UX complements, needs to be understandable and not only the users but also the interfaces, for example, the screen reader. They also need to be robust so that the content can be consumed by a variety of user agents or browsers, so that they work with assistive technology.” -Björn

• “Google actually gives out 16 best practices, all of those are about security aspects of the website. If they are running on https, for example. If the resources included are from secured sources, if the connection to the database is secure. All that stuff.” -Björn

• “The SEO path is really weak. It gives you a very rudimentary view on SEO and stuff which needs to be in place. For example, they check if the page is optimized for search engines with site rankings, like if its indexable or not.” -Björn

• “So basically Google is putting together for SEO based on whether your pages are actually SEO accessible. Its not evaluating the content of the page, its not giving an individual ranking for SEO factors. Its just binary, like can we evaluate your page for SEO or not.” -Ben

• “The concept here is you can basically have a browser-based web app. So for the end-user, theyre going through the same experience to load a webpage but the functionality is the same as a separate web application.” -Ben

• “The thing with PWA is, its very, very fast. You click on a link and instantly it opens up a new page on the site. On the Lighthouse test, the PWA audits are actually based on a checklist that Google compiled.” -Björn

• “It seems that the progressive web app, being included in the Lighthouse is really just Google suggesting that this is the best way to have a website perform. Because at the end of the day, Google wants the highest performant, best possible pages because that ends up helping their user experience.” -Ben