Your website is your storefront, business card, and brand ambassador all rolled into one.
It’s the first point of contact many customers will have with your business, so its performance is paramount.
Enter the Lighthouse score, a crucial yet often misunderstood element in the toolbox of website performance metrics.
Let’s take a deeper look at what Google’s Lighthouse score is and how it works.
What is the Lighthouse Score?
Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool developed by Google to help improve the quality of web pages.
It audits performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more. When you run Lighthouse, it gives you a score from 0 to 100 across these categories, with a higher score indicating better performance.
It essentially offers a snapshot of how well your site is doing and where there’s room for improvement.
Why It Matters
So, why does the Lighthouse score matter?
- User Experience (UX): At the core of your Lighthouse score is the user experience. A high score typically reflects a site that loads quickly, is easy to navigate, and is accessible to a wide range of users, including those with disabilities.
- SEO Rankings: Search engines love speedy, efficient, and accessible websites. A good Lighthouse score can impact your site’s SEO ranking, making it more likely to ascend the search results.
- Conversion Rates: The smoother the user experience, the higher the likelihood of converting visitors into customers. A website that scores well in Lighthouse is optimised for performance, meaning it’s fast, responsive, and reliable – all key factors in keeping a user engaged and ready to take action.
Breaking Down the Score
Understanding the components of your Lighthouse score is key to leveraging it for your website’s benefit. Here’s a brief overview:
- Performance: This measures how quickly your site loads and becomes interactive. Factors include the speed of the first contentful paint (FCP), time to interactive (TTI), and speed index.
- Accessibility: This audit focuses on how accessible your website is to users with disabilities. It checks for proper use of ARIA roles, colour contrast ratios, and keyboard accessibility, among other things.
- Best Practices: This category evaluates your site against best practices for web development, such as HTTPS usage, correct image aspect ratios, and avoiding deprecated APIs.
- SEO: The SEO audit checks whether your site is optimised for search engine visibility. It includes checks for meta tags, descriptive link text, and HTTP status codes.
Improving Your Lighthouse Score
Improving your Lighthouse score starts with understanding where your website currently stands.
Running a Lighthouse audit is straightforward – you can do it directly in Google Chrome’s Developer Tools or via web-based tools like PageSpeed Insights.
Once you have your results, focus on the areas with the lowest scores or where improvements can have the most impact.
For instance, optimising images, leveraging browser caching, and minimising JavaScript can dramatically improve your site’s performance score.
In Conclusion
A website’s Lighthouse score guides websites towards better visibility, user engagement, and overall performance.
By understanding and improving your score, you enhance your site’s user experience and its ability to compete.
Whether you’re a business owner, a blogger, or a digital marketer, keeping an eye on your Lighthouse score is a crucial step in ensuring your website meets the high standards of today’s web.
Blue Bee can determine your Lighthouse and create a plan for boosting your website’s SEO and marketing performance. Contact us today to learn more.