What Is Google Lighthouse?

Are you sure that your website serves in a user-oriented way? There are several ways to measure this. Google Lighthouse is really widespread because it is an open-source tool by Google. This tool’s main purpose is to find errors in technical issues such as performance and SEO of a website to create a user experience score, then provide a detailed brief on how to fix these errors. Many technical details on your website give you various warnings due to Lighthouse gauges and audits through various indexes.

Google Lighthouse Measure

So what exactly does Google Lighthouse measure? Here are below the categories Google Lighthouse measures:

  • Performance
  • Progressive Web App
  • Accessibility
  • Best Practices
  • SEO

Lighthouse Reports present to you in their papers measurements made with various metrics web developers can benefit from. Let’s get to know a few popular concepts with you!

Google Lighthouse SEO Audits

Google Lighthouse SEO Audit and Metrics

Search Engine Optimization Score is one of the categories that Google Lighthouse audits measure. SEO measures whether a website meets search engines’ criteria, both in terms of content and software and technical issues.

The system performs a total of 13 different audits within the framework of SEO audits. The user’s website gets a specific score from each audit, then it forms the total score. These audits are generally related to keywords, canonicals, hreflang, titles, and of course, meta descriptions.

Accessibility Audit and Metrics

The functions and contents within a website must be accessible and usable for the user, especially for people with disabilities who do not perceive every stimulus for both mobile devices and desktops. In this context, the Lighthouse test gives information about how powerful screen readers can work on your site. Whether the images have attributes or other details, give an idea of how intensely people with disabilities can experience your website.

Google Lighthouse Progressive Web Apps Audits

Progressive Web Apps Audits

Google Lighthouse also audits Progressive Web Applications. This category is very important if you want to make sure that your website works without any errors. To create your total score within the PWA category, Google Lighthouse performs 15 different audits in total. You should try again after making various improvements to the audits you failed to pass. You can check the controls manually.

Performance & 6 Important Metrics

Performance, one of the most important and popular categories of Lighthouse, includes six basic metrics. We list these metrics as First Contentful Paint, First Meaningful Paint, Speed Index, Time to Interactive, First CPU Idle, then Estimated Input Latency. These usually provide very important information regarding the loading time and running performance of the website. With this information, you can get a chance to estimate the user experience and bounce rate.

What are Google Lighthouse Opportunities

What are Google Lighthouse Opportunities?

Google Lighthouse gives you information about what will help you achieve higher scores with fewer improvements. You can find this information in the Opportunities section. Here are the improvements you need to make and the estimated savings information you’ll earn if you made those improvements. Generally, compressing images, cleaning CSS, or Javascript are considered in this context. Also, any action that needs to be done regarding redirects or render-blocking resources is listed here.

Best Practices Category & Audit Metrics

Lighthouse performs the Best Practice among audits. Testing 16 different practices on the website is extremely important, especially in understanding whether you comply with modern website requirements.

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So what exactly does it analyze? Let’s say right away. It is especially important to use HTTPS and HTTP 2 on websites. Also, it measures additional features such as Lighthouse, the vulnerability of JavaScript libraries, which measures whether they are used or not. It thus helps you gain more detailed information about the working practices of your website. All these details are extremely popular.

Conclusion: Google Lighthouse

Making sure your website serves people with a really strong performance is essential for two things:

  • Website traffic: Want to increase the number of users visiting your website? Your ranking on Google or other search engines will be very important for you. Then, one of the first ways you can improve your rankings is to increase your SEO score.
  • Website conversion rate: The accessibility rates of your page will be closely related to designing a user-oriented website.

If you have read thus far, we believe you might be interested in improving your pages even further. If that’s the case, let us demonstrate the uses of another tool that you might utilize, namely, the GTmetrix Speed Test.

Frequently Asked Questions About

Generally, Lighthouse can give you tasks such as text compression, removal of unused CSS, minification of existing CSS, and Javascript. Simultaneously, the extra tasks related to Webfont loading and details regarding the need to improve the Critical Rendering Path (CRP) are also suggested.

It is possible to complete the audit easily and quickly via Lighthouse. It only takes a short time to enter a URL on the platform and then complete all audits on this URL.

This concept calculates the first moment when the text or image content on your website becomes visible to the user and then tells you the time to pass for this moment.

Speed Index, a very strong index of how long your website is loaded, is an important tool in user experience.

Yes, Google Lighthouse is an open-source platform.

Yavuz Sadıkoğlu

Posts: 81

Since his early years, Yavuz has been studying the inner workings of different digital environments.

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