How Google Lighthouse ranks a website

What is Google lighthouse?
Lighthouse could be a tool engineered by Google and was initially meant to audit Progressive net Apps (PWA). The tool executes four audits for accessibility, performance, Progressive net Apps associate degreed an extended list of best practices. Recently, Google even additional a basic SEO check. Together, these provide you with a superb summary of the standard and performance of your web site or net app.

Site speed is all regarding perception and user expertise. Speed in numbers means that nothing if your web site still feels slow. a lot of users round the world square measure on rather bad mobile connections of 3G or less. Even with lightning-fast 4G connections, a web site will merely feel laggy and slow. and that we all understand what a devastating result a slow web site will wear your conversion. Shaving milliseconds of the time required to load your web site might build a world of distinction.

While testing, Google tower simulates visiting your mobile web site via a flaky 3G association on a rather underpowered device. Packets square measure lost in a shot to simulate real-world conditions as genuinely as doable. when running the check, you’ll get a report with a score and unjust recommendation with problems to tackle. Granted, the recently updated and redesigned check My web site by Google is infinitely additional stunning, however additionally a great deal less comprehensive.

PageSpeed Insights vs. Google Lighthouse

PageSpeed Insights is maybe the foremost used web site speed analysis tool out there. whereas it offers you a pleasant score and a listing of doable enhancements, it additionally offers you a plan of the perceived loading speed of your web site. Also, PageSpeed Insights offers recommendations, however these square measure onerous, if not not possible to implement – obtaining a 100/100 could be a dream for many sites.

The two most vital things PageSpeed Insights appearance at:

First Contentful Paint: this can be the time that it takes before a user sees a visible response from the page.

DOM Content Loaded: this can be the time that it takes to completely take apart associate degreed render an hypertext mark-up language document, ie. the requested page.
Lighthouse takes a far additional sensible approach and puts user expertise front and center. It visits your web site over a throttled 3G association therefore it will emulate what a true traveller within the universe would expertise. rather than simply loading your web site as PageSpeed Insights will, tower checks however and once it responds to input. It finds the precise moment once your content is prepared to use, therefore you’ll attempt to optimize that once it feels too slow.

What to seem for in Lighthouse results?

The whole conception of dashing up your mobile {site|website|web web site} is two-pronged; your site should be quick, and it should feel quick. You, therefore, ought to get your content on screen as quick as doable. Don’t let individuals wait. Also, users should be able to move along with your content as before long as doable. Since Google declared that page speed could be a ranking issue for SEO, you would like to repair these problems.

What ought to your priority be? Load your content 1st. impressive graphics and killer animations will wait. Your message – and what individuals square measure searching for – is possibly within the content. you’ll load the remainder of the content within the background and ease it on the sc

Metrics used:

While activity the preen anon.erformance of your mobile web site, tower uses the subsequent metrics:

First substantive paint:

This determines however long it takes for the primary substantive content to look onscreen. The lower the score, the quicker that page seems.

First interactive:

This measures once a page is minimally interactive. This determines if most UI parts square measure interactive and if the screen responds moderately to user input.

Consistently interactive: This measures once a page is totally interactive.

The lighthouse SEO check

The latest addition to tower may be a basic SEO check. With this check, you’ll run an easy SEO audit to uncover basics SEO problems a website could have. It provides you suggestions to mend them likewise. Since lighthouse runs domestically in your browser, you’ll run the checks on your staging surroundings likewise.

Google says the SEO check is extremely abundant a piece current which it presently supports solely the foremost basic SEO checks. they’re actively taking note of users’ feedback to enhance it and to feature checks to bring worth to SEOs.

Currently, lighthouse checks:

• Does it have a tag with breadth or initial-scale
• Does the document have a element?
• Is there a meta description?
• Does the page have a triple-crown hypertext transfer protocol standing code?
• Do links have descriptive text?
• Does the document use clear font sizes?
• Is page not blocked from indexing?
• Does the document have a sound hreflang
• Does the document have a sound rel=canonical
• Are there any unwanted plugins?

Also, it suggests some further checks to run manually. These embrace the Google Mobile-friendly check and also the Structured knowledge Testing tool.

How to install Google tower

Getting started with Google tower is extremely straightforward because it is made into Chrome’s Developer Tools Audit panel (Mac: Shift+Cmd+I. Win: Ctrl+Shift+J or F12). From there, you’ll run the check and obtain the total report. additionally, there’s a separate Chrome add-on for tower that adds a button to your toolbar, tho’ exploitation it stays an equivalent.

You can conjointly run tower as a Node package. This way, you’ll incorporate the check into your build method. once exploitation the Node package, you may conjointly see that there ar some of audits that solely add a Node surroundings and not within the Audits panel of the DevTools.

If you want to install Lighthouse globally from the command line use: npm install -g lighthouse

If you want to run a test for https://example.com use: lighthouse https://example.com

The full results of the audit will be available in the terminal, but also in a separate HTML file.