Technical SEO – What Is Google Lighthouse and Why You Should Use It?

Technical SEO – What Is Google Lighthouse and Why You Should Use It?

August 26, 2022
2:13 pm

Some of the most significant performance parameters for your website are included in your Google Lighthouse score.

What is a Google Lighthouse Score, exactly? And what can you do to make it better?

What Is Google Lighthouse?

Google Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool that helps you enhance the quality of your web pages by giving strong insights. A Google Lighthouse report allows you to measure and rate how pleasant a user experience your web pages are, as well as provide you with highly useful advice on how to enhance such experiences.

Google Expects Excellent User Experiences.

Both the website users and the website owner profit from a positive user experience. However, a bad user experience will irritate the former while causing significant short- and long-term damage to the latter. And Google Lighthouse will tell you all you need to know about whether your web pages are providing a decent user experience – and, if they aren’t, how to change them.

What Does It Mean To Have A Good User Experience?

An excellent user experience means that visitors to your website have smooth contact with it. The user should be able to explore, engage, and conduct tasks on your website without encountering any annoying interruptions. On the other hand, a sub-optimal or terrible user experience with bugs or intrusive pop-ups would cause a user to abandon your website right away. If Google determines that your website is offering a bad user experience, it will penalize your SEO efforts and reduce the visibility of your business online.

So, How Might a Google Lighthouse Score Be of Assistance?

Google has lately emphasized on-page experience, including the addition of a new set of Core Web Vitals, which you can learn about in this helpful blog. Lighthouse provides a ‘customer’s perspective,’ indicating which aspects of the user experience are operating effectively and which aren’t.

What Are the Metrics That Google Lighthouse Employs?

  • Performance
  • Best practices
  • Accessibility
  • Progressive web app
  • SEO

 

For inspecting your pages and identifying where adjustments are needed, Lighthouse offers a simple 1-100 grade system.

You may also expand each area to gain more in-depth information.

For example, it’s long been known that Google’s algorithm takes into account load speed and mobile experience – and Lighthouse will tell you how well your website performs in these areas.

Other Important Metrics

  • Visual Stability: While Jump Around is a great song, you and your consumers don’t want your content to be doing that while it’s loading.
  • Security: It’s not secure if a page isn’t operating on HTTPS. And if knowledgeable users see that it isn’t safe, they won’t trust your site – or your brand.
  • Intrusive annoying stuff: We’re talking about pop-ups that obstruct your view, slow down load times, and make you want to hurl your computer or phone out the window (not recommended)

 

Is It Possible for Everyone to Utilize Google Lighthouse?

Once you have the insights Lighthouse gives, you must know what to do with them. And it’s at this point that you’ll need access to a highly trained web development staff capable of making critical improvements.