What Is Google Lighthouse?

Website creation and management are necessary for businesses but can be difficult without the right tools. Understanding the best search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to use is only half the battle. However, there's another useful tool for website creation and management: it's called Google Lighthouse, and it can make ranking your website a lot easier.



Now, you may be wondering, "What is Google Lighthouse?," and that's a great question. In short, it simplifies the process of creating an SEO-optimized website and helps your site rank better against your competition. But there's more to it than just that.

This article will explain exactly what Google Lighthouse is, how it works, and how you can use it to improve your website's performance and rank. Let's dive in. 

What Is Google Lighthouse?

Google Lighthouse is a free, automated tool that can help you measure the quality of your website and page experience. It's open-source and can analyze both public and private websites.

Lighthouse gives users an accessible way to check in on a website's performance, user experience, and overall SEO health. You can use it to pinpoint areas where your website does well and areas that need improvement. For example, if you have a website that loads lightning-fast on a desktop but struggles on mobile devices, Google Lighthouse will let you know. You can then take appropriate measures to fix these issues, whether by optimizing images or reformatting content.

How Does Google Lighthouse Work?

Google Lighthouse provides you with a report called an audit. The audit showcases several important factors, including performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. Here's a breakdown of how each works: 

• Performance: Performance measures the load times of a website, how quickly users can navigate the website, and the time from when the page first loads to when it becomes interactive. The performance metrics include the time to interactive (TTI), first contentful paint (FCP), speed index (SI), largest contentful paint (LCP), total blocking time (TBT), and cumulative layout shift (CLS).
• Accessibility: Accessibility measures how accessible your website is to people using assistive technologies — for example, those using mobility devices or those who are visually or hearing impaired.
• Best practices: Best practices measure whether the website follows updated standards and best practices used in web development. 
• SEO: SEO measures the technical aspects of search engine optimization. It determines whether your website is responsive, has functional external and internal links, has alt text for images, and uses keyword optimization, optimized title tags, and meta descriptions, among other metrics.

Google Lighthouse compares your website against standard metrics and rules for the above factors, such as the core web vitals report. The Lighthouse report assigns your website a score ranging from 0 to 100. Because Google is one of the most used search engines, understanding how Google ranks your page is important to the page's success.

How To Use Google Lighthouse

Google Lighthouse is a tool created by Google LLC. For Chrome users, here's how you can implement Google Lighthouse in your website management: 

Chrome DevTools 

The word "DevTools" may be intimidating, but using Lighthouse through Chrome DevTools is actually quite easy. We'll show you how to do it.

First, navigate to the page you want to run a report on. From there, right-click anywhere on the page and select "Inspect."

The DevTools panel will open. From here, you can select "Lighthouse" on the top of the toolbar. 

If you don't see the option for Lighthouse on the toolbar, click on the two arrows.

Alternatively, you can click and drag on the left side of the DevTools menu to widen it until Lighthouse appears at the top.

Select all the categories you'd like to generate a report on. You can choose from performance, accessibility, best practices, SEO, and progressive web app. Then click "Analyze page load."

A new screen will appear to show you the progress of the audit. Loading the page will take a few minutes.

Once the analysis finishes, you can see a report breaking down all the categories you chose previously and how well your page performed. 

Below you can see that the performance of Find the Invisible Cow is at 51. Below the scores, you'll also find a section explaining what issues may have affected Lighthouse's analysis of the webpage.

Chrome Extension

To use Google's Lighthouse Chrome extension, first download the extension here by clicking "Add to Chrome." A new screen will appear, prompting your decision. Click "Add extension" to add Lighthouse to your Chrome extensions. 

Once added, visit the website you'd like to audit and open "Lighthouse" from the extension menu. If it's not visible at the top, click on the main extension menu (the white puzzle piece icon to the right) to show all extensions. Find "Lighthouse" from there and click. 

Next, click "Generate report." This will analyze your chosen website and bring up the performance metrics. You can also choose the cog in the upper-right corner to customize the categories you wish to see. 

After waiting a brief period, you'll receive your report. You can analyze your performance metrics, such as FCP and LCP, and other metrics here. 

Things To Keep In Mind

As you use developer tools such as Google Lighthouse to evaluate page speed insights and other information, you may notice a few things in your reports. Your scores may change depending on when and how you run your audits, even if no changes to the website occur. Factors such as network conditions, how you're connected to the internet, how many extensions you have, whether they impact your network, and ads displayed on the website may all affect your report.

Google Lighthouse is undoubtedly a useful tool, made even more amazing by the fact that it's free to use. It gives you invaluable insights into your website and how you can improve its ranking. Once you've used Google Lighthouse, you might be wondering what exactly you're supposed to do with the results. It can be confusing to know what comes next, but Optimize is here to help. 

Our team of experienced digital marketers and web developers can help you create and manage your online presence, including your business website. Schedule your free consultation and learn more about how we can help you succeed online.