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What is Google Lighthouse?

Google Lighthouse

Lighthouse is Google's automated open source tool used to analyze, measure and improve website quality . You can use this tool for all types of websites (from public websites to websites that require authentication). What are the applications of the Lighthouse?

 

Lighthouse will help you comprehensively check the criteria necessary for the web to function effectively, including: performance, accessibility, progressive web app, SEO capabilities, ... and many more. 

It can be said that Lighthouse is the most comprehensive tool of Google today to help users evaluate the website accurately. In addition to its extensive analytical capabilities, this tool also offers useful tips to improve the quality of your website.

How to use Google Lighthouse

Google Lighthouse

There are 3 ways to use Google Lighthouse :

  • Run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools
  • Install and run the Node Command line tool
  • Run Lighthouse using the Chrome Extension

What are the Google Lighthouse Audit Standards?

With Lighthouse , you can easily audit developing websites on localhost or private server. These include:

What is Google Lighthouse - Performance?

Google Lighthouse

 

Performance (website performance) will depend on many factors, both the back-end and the front-end. To be appreciated by Lighthouse, you need: Optimize images, minify Css / Js, speed up website by lazy loading, ... 

However, increasing the user experience is still the most important thing. If the experience enhancement factors (e.g. image quality) must be sacrificed to achieve a high performance score, it is not necessary. 75 points is the acceptable rating for this performance category.

What is Google Lighthouse - Progressive Web App?

Google Lighthouse

 

The addition of this feature to the Lighthouse by Google is an early forecast to make Progressive Web App a mandatory standard in the future. However, if you currently do not have enough resources and time, you do not need to focus on developing this category. But there are a few items that must be done:

  • Use HTTPS
  • Redirect HTTP traffic over HTTPS
  • The content is wrapped in sight
  • There is a tag <meta name = "viewport"> that allows to change the Width and Scale
  • Returns the full content when there is a Javascript error

What is Google Lighthouse - Accessibility?

Google Lighthouse

 

This Lighthouse feature will let you know if your website has been optimized for accessibility or not. Maybe the website has some points that need improvement such as: the text is too small, the contrast of the objects is low, ... You need to achieve 100 points in this section.

What is Google Lighthouse - Best Practices?

Best Practices requires some mandatory standards of the website. The absolute score of 100 is the target you need to achieve in this section.

What are the latest Google Lighthouse 3.0 features?

Lighthouse 3.0 is the latest version of Google today. It offers faster inspection and analysis, less errors and new testing features. Here are some notable new features of Google Lighthouse 3.0:

  • Faster testing, more accurate results with smaller error / variability.
  • New, simpler and more convenient user interface.
  • The Node version of Lighthouse 3.0 is compatible with the same configuration options as the CLI version.
  • The report results can be exported to a CSV file.
  • New Audit: First Contentful Paint (reports the time users see the first response from the website), robots.txt is not valid, replace GIF file with video for animated content, ...

Lighthouse is a very important tool in the process of building, designing and optimizing websites. Therefore, in order for your website to get better results on Google Search, you need to understand how to use this tool. Hope these shares will help you in the process of improving website performance. You should also contact your hosting and website design provider so that they can best assist you. Good luck!

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Shafiq Armani
I'm Shafiq Armani, an expert in selling group buying tools. With more than 10 years of experience in the digital marketing industry
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