What is lighthouse speed test and Why is It Important

This is one of the best Google tools available free to help you enhance the quality of the webpages of your website. The main function of the tool is to help audit the webpages for your performance, SEO, accessibility, and much more. Not just this, it also offers the required suggestions. This is basically, an open-sourced software and can be used by any individual for designing their website. This includes the likes of SEO, web developer, or a website owner; with the help of the Lighthouse that can also help enhance the overall performance and experience. So, how does the Google Lighthouse work? Let us take a look:

The Working of the Google Lighthouse

Here are some of the main aspects of the working of the Google Lighthouse:

1. The Performance

This essentially implies the fact that the tool helps measure how quickly the website loads and how quickly it can be accessed.

It offers the reports of the performance based on five speed metrics such as:

The First Contentful Paint (FCP): This feature measures the time taken by the very first text or image to get visible to the users.

The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This feature is used to calculate the time taken by a page to load the largest element it comprises.

Total Blocking Time (TBT): This feature helps measure the time taken when the page is blocked from reacting to the input of the user. This is a lot similar to a click by the mouse.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This feature helps measure the layout shifts that take place when the user needs to access the webpage.

The Speed Index (SI): This feature helps display just how smoothly the content of the page can be loaded.

Hence you see, the Google Lighthouse helps display the overall performance score to a certain page according to the performance of the page for the above mentioned metrics. This score can range all the way from 0-100.

Here you see, if you score somewhere between 90-100, then it shows that your webpage is well-optimized for the user experience. However, anything below 90 displays that there are certain resources within your page that are responsible for slowing it down. This is what mainly affects the overall performance of the webpage.

The best part is yet to come; here the Google Lighthouse also goes ahead and offers you the required suggestions. These as and when implemented can help a great deal to speed things up for your website.

1. The Accessibility

The Google Lighthouse, as a tool, also tests to analyze how well those people can utilize the assistive technology that can access your website. Here it works by applying elements such as ‘buttons’ and ‘Links’ to check if they have been described well enough. Not just this, but it also helps analyze the images to check if they are ‘alt text) specified. This way if the users with limited or no vision have to use the readers, they can easily understand the image.

Much like the ‘Performance’ the accessibility report also comprises a ‘100 score’. Here, more that your website can score better are the results.

1. The Best Practises

This feature of the Google Lighthouse has been designed to check if the page has been designed using the modern standards of web development. Here, the Lighthouse works by examining certain factors such as:

• Resources have been loaded from the secure servers with HTTPS.

• All the images are displayed using the correct aspect ratio and within appropriate resolution

• To find out if all the JavaScript libraries have been secured and free from any vulnerabilities.

• HTML doctype included within the page

• Content Security Policy (CSP) has been created to be more effective against certain cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks

• Page has been created to be free from all browser errors

• The page has been created to be free from deprecated frameworks and also the APIs.

• Valid source maps are included in the Page maps.

• Page has been freed from specific problems that appear within the Chrome DevTools panel, such as: network request failures, insufficient security measures, and other such browser-related problems.

• The page character encoding has been set with the meta charset tag

• The page ensures that the users to be able to paste password within the password field

• The Page is able to create a good user experience by blocking the geolocation and the notification permission as requested on the page load.

1. The SEO

The Google Lighthouse works by running a test to analyze the webpage for certain technical problems. Basically its main focus is:

• If the webpage is mobile-friendly

• If the Page comprises of a valid structured data

• If the Internal links are crawlable

• If the Page contain a valid hreflang attribute

• Title and meta description tags are set as required.

• The page is indexable

• The Robots.txt is valid

• The Page is returning HTTP 200 (OK) status response code

• Page comprises of a valid "rel=canonical" tag set

• The Page content does not includes of any plugins

• Links within a page have been introduced within the descriptive text

• Images within a page comprise of all the image that are alt texts specified

• Page comprises of a viewport meta tag along with width or initial-scale set

CONCLUSION

That’s all that we have at the moment on What is lighthouse sped test and Why is It Important. Do let us know how we did.

Hi, my name is Pitter and I am a Content Writer at Topguestpost, India. I write creative blogs on a varied niche such as fashion, beauty,Tech, saas,Business and more.