Lighthouse | Google

Tool : Technical SEO
Plateform : Web
Price : Free

Short description : Lighthouse

Test and optimize your pages for a good user experience and good ranking thanks to Google Lighthouse

Long Description : Lighthouse

Description Google Lighthouse

Google Lighthouse is an open source tool developed by Google to help webmarketers check certain statistics, such as the performance, SEO and accessibility of their web pages using scores. This allows webmarketers to optimize their web pages and improve their scores based on metrics. Did you know? All it takes is for your website not to load within the first three seconds for 53% of users to leave you very quickly. The obvious solution is to increase the speed and performance of your website. Precisely, Google Lighthouse is the perfect tool that you can use for free to test the pages of your website in terms of performance, accessibility and natural referencing. Let’s discover in this short description how the Google Lighthouse tool works.

What is Google Lighthouse?

Google Lighthouse is the answer to the lack of a perfect tool to help famous websites that were struggling with performance issues. This is how Google Lighthouse saw its days as an automated tool for measuring performance, accessibility, and SEO scores. It helps lots of developers around the world to improve and boost their web pages accordingly to gain authority in SERPs. Indeed, Lighthouse optimizes each segment of a page such as:

The DOM hierarchy;
The hierarchy of each HTML 5 tag;
Unused CSS and JavaScript;
The ratio of color combinations;
The loading time of third-party Js and Css;
And many other things.

What does Google Lighthouse measure?

Google Lighthouse gives a clear breakdown of your website’s most important metrics like:

Site

Performance Performance is generally considered the most valuable metric given by the Google Lighthouse tool. Like PageSpeed Insights, the ‘Performance’ area of the Lighthouse report contains some useful metrics you can use to make your site perform to climb Google’s rankings.

These are essentially:

First Contentful Paint: Still called FCP, this metric measures the time required for the browser to render the first DOM (Document Object Model) content of the page. DOM content can be images, SVGs, etc. Lighthouse displays the FCP score in seconds;
Speed Index: Google Lighthouse provides this score to gauge how quickly content is displayed visually when loading the page;
Cumulative layout shift: Often abbreviated as CLS, the CLS score indicates the number of layout shifts that occur during a full page load.

Following Google Lighthouse’s prescribed site performance improvements will give you a better chance of ranking higher on search engine results pages.

Website accessibility

Basically, this metric presents potential chances to improve the availability and customer experience of your mobile app or website. Tracking the accessibility improvement report will ensure that your customers can explore and use your site without much effort.

Rapport d amelioration de l accessibilite Google Lighthouse

Here are the important tests carried out by the tool in terms of accessibility:

Structure of elements: Lighthouse gives you information guaranteeing that your HTML content is very well organized;
Site contrast: Lighthouse provides you with information about your website contract to let you know if your content is readable and decipherable or not;
Naming of Elements: When certain elements of your website, such as alt text for images, are not named appropriately and meaningfully, Lighthouse will let you know.

While giving an accurate overview of accessibility suggestions, the tool will also reveal to you which audits you have passed, which approaches are not relevant, and which additional checks you need to perform.

Best practices

Another equally important segment of the Google Lighthouse tool is the best practices metric.

Metrique des meilleures platiques Google Lighthouse

This part of Lighthouse’s report does not neatly give performance data. However, it will give you recommendations that can improve both your exposure and the customer experience, especially for mobile sites.

Natural referencing

The last and most dynamic strength of Google’s Lighthouse tool is the SEO metric. Most web designers and SEO specialists prefer to use Google Lighthouse to analyze a site because even PageSpeed doesn’t have an SEO review feature. The tool’s SEO metric builds on the fundamentals to examine your page’s streamlining for search engine results ranking.

However, here is what Lighthouse can examine in terms of SEO:

The tool checks if the indexing of the page does not experience any impediment;
Lighthouse lets you see if links have descriptive text;
It flags pages without a successful HTTP status code;
It denounces unwanted plugins that prevent proper functioning;
It checks if the document has a <title> component;
It also checks for the availability of a valid hreflang on the document;
It verifies the existence of meta description tags in their reasonable length;
Lighthouse checks if the document has a valid rel=canonical;
It also checks whether the document uses readable font sizes;
It also checks if there is a <meta name=”viewport”> tag with an initial width or scale.

Moreover, it offers additional physically executed checks. These incorporate the Google Mobile-friendly Test and a structured data testing feature.

How to install Google Lighthouse?

To install Lighthouse, you have several options:

Install the Lighthouse extension

The easiest way to install and use Lighthouse is to go to the Chrome store, download the free extension and add it to your Navigator.

Once installed, you can check each page directly in your browser by selecting the Lighthouse icon on your browser and clicking “generate report” to see issues and recommendations.

Chrome Developer Tools

This is perhaps the easiest option for running the Google Lighthouse audit. Chrome DevTools is the easiest way to run audits on pages that require authentication. Reports are also provided in a user-friendly format.

Although you use a different installation method, you will also need Chrome for this tool to work. With Chrome DevTools, all you have to do is go to the page you want to audit, right-click, and select ‘inspect element’. There will be an audit tab in Google Lighthouse, where you can then run the audit and get a report in 90 seconds or less. In general, Google Lighthouse is an almost perfect auditing tool that you can use to check and improve your website’s performance.

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Company : Lighthouse

Google is an American company, founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It specializes in the provision of technological services and has grown in Silicon Valley in California. Since 2015, Google has been a subsidiary of the Alphabet company with Sundar Pichai as CEO. The Google company created the Google search engine, which is one of the most widely used in the world. The latter is highly appreciated for its ability to offer many relevant results to the queries of its users. Apart from its search engine, the Google company has many other subsidiaries which are: