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Lighthouse Audit

Lighthouse can be used as a Chrome extension or as an online tool. By running a Lighthouse audit, the performance and quality of the website is analysed, and provides suggestions for improving performance and user experience.

Lighthouse was created in 2016 by Google. It was initially released as a Chrome extension, but later became an online tool and was integrated with other Google development tools, including Google's other development tools, such as PageSpeed Insights y Chrome DevTools . Since then, Lighthouse has been widely used by web developers and web site owners to improve the performance and quality of their improve the performance and quality of their pages.

Lighthouse's goal is to help web developers create fast, secure and high quality websites that provide an excellent user experience. It can also be used by website owners to evaluate the performance and quality of their sites, and take steps to improve them.

The Lighthouse assessment analyses 4 parameters and suggests improvements. These parameters are:

Performance

The Lighthouse performance audit provides suggestions for improving performance, including:

  1. Loading speed: Lighthouse provides suggestions for optimising website loading speed, such as compressing images and removing unnecessary resources.
  2. CPU and memory usage: Helps identify and fix performance issues that may be consuming system resources and slowing down the page.
  3. Image optimisation: Suggests ways to optimise the size and quality of images to improve loading speed.
  4. JavaScript and CSS optimisation: Provides enhancements to optimise the use of JavaScript and CSS on the website to improve performance.
  5. Cache optimisation: Lighthouse helps to configure the cache properly to improve loading speed.
  6. User experience optimisation: Suggests improvements to the user experience on the page, such as reducing the waiting time for the first read and improving navigation.

Accessibility

It is very important that the website is accessible to everyone. To this end, it audits and proposes changes to:

  1. Content tagging: All content must be appropriately tagged and semantic tags must be used to improve understanding by accessibility tools.
  2. Colour contrast: The contrast between text and background must be high enough to be legible for the visually impaired.
  3. Navigation and links: The navigation of the website must be clear and easy to follow, and all links must be well indicated and meaningful.
  4. Multimedia: Multimedia content such as images and videos should include captions or alternative descriptions to make it accessible to people with hearing and/or visual impairments.
  5. Forms: The forms on the site should be easy to complete and well indicated.
  6. Errors: The website must not contain accessibility errors that may hinder its use by persons with disabilities.

Best practices

The best practices involve improvements in terms of programming and page development, mainly focused on loading speed. Some of the improvements they propose are:

  1. Use of HTTPS: It is essential that the website uses HTTPS to improve security and user privacy.
  2. Redirects: There should be no unnecessary redirects on the page that can slow down loading.
  3. Load optimisation: Load optimisation techniques such as deferred loading of JavaScript and background loading of images are proposed.
  4. File compression: Files must be compressed to reduce file size and improve loading speed.
  5. Cache optimisation: The cache must be configured correctly to improve loading speed.
  6. Use of third party services: It is important that any third party services used on the site do not adversely affect loading.
  7. Optimisation of the user experience: Measures must be taken to optimise the user experience, such as reducing the waiting time for the first reading and improving navigation.

SEO

If we want the page to have an optimal positioning, in addition to applying the above suggestions, it is essential to have 100% SEO. To do so, they must be configured correctly:

  1. Titles and metadata: Web titles and metadata should be relevant and attractive to search engines.
  2. Links: The page must have quality external links - access to better links - and relevant links pointing to it to improve its search engine ranking.
  3. Content: Content should always be of quality and relevant to the audience, which in turn helps to improve search engine rankings.
  4. Keywords: It is important to use relevant keywords for the keyword you want to position. To find related words we can go to Google's keyword planner at Google Ads.
  5. User experience: Google is all about user experience. It wants the fastest and most complete information possible to be found. To achieve this, the page must be easy to use and must provide a satisfactory user experience, which also improves the ranking.
  6. Optimisation for mobile devices: The navigation of the website must be optimised, so it must be adapted to different devices, either Responsive or Mobile First.

How to access the Lighthouse Audit

To run the website audit, you can install the Chrome extension, access the google test link, or right-click inside the page (having accessed from Google Chrome) and press “inspect” and “Lighthouse Audit”.

How to improve the Lighthouse audit

Performance

To improve the performance of the lighthouse audit there are a series of simple recommendations that can be applied.

The first of these is image optimization. Reducing the size of images so they load faster helps speed up loading. This is possible by compressing images with tools such as Google's Webp and format optimization.

Another tip is to minimize the size of the files as much as possible. CSS, javascript and HTML help reduce this size.

To the extent possible, the application of AMP technology allows for optimal loading speed, in addition to allowing an improved user experience on mobile devices.

In addition to image and file compression, other recommendations are to reduce the number of requests made by the page and to use as few external resources as possible as they can slow down the page load.

Finally, it is important to make sure that the hosting is adequate to load the web page without time penalties.

Accessibility

Accessibility is important to allow all users, regardless of their abilities, to access and understand the page effectively.

To improve this parameter, it is convenient to use semantic HTML tags such as header, nav, main, article and footer , in order to achieve a clearer and easier to understand structure.

In addition, image "alt" tags must be filled out correctly, create links that contain descriptive text, and add subtitles and audio in video descriptions, in order to help visually impaired users navigate the site. Web.

Lastly, the content must be written in a clear language that makes it easy to read, and written with appropriate contrasting colors that make it easy for visually impaired users to read.

Better practices

Regarding the best practices, to increase the value of the parameter it is advisable to use a CDN content server, which improves the loading speed.

In addition, static elements must be cached in order to reduce loading times for users who visit the page later. A good management of the cache allows the access to the page in zones of limited connection or even without connection.

Another tip is to minimize the number of HTTP requests, either by file merging or by concatenation techniques. The transmission of resources must also be allowed through a single connection, with HTTP/2.

However, each web page is different, so these practices must be applied as far as possible, having corrected beforehand if there were other more relevant errors.

SEO

The lighthouse audit allows you to identify some of the basic errors that web pages have regarding SEO.

These errors make it difficult for search engines to understand the information, which penalizes its positioning.

It must be understood that facilitating the work of search engines as far as possible means that the web will be better valued for its ranking. On the other hand, if the web is not prepared to facilitate the reading of the engines that value its positioning, the web will be clearly harmed by them.

To improve this reading, titles and descriptions that are as optimized as possible, relevant keywords, as well as descriptions that are attractive to users must be used. These descriptions must not only be brief and concise, but they must also attract the attention of those who are looking for related information, since a low CTR (low click-through rate with respect to impressions) directly harms positioning.

It is also preferable that all the content that the page includes is of quality, updated, that is for the users. I have not had bad writing always penalizes the user experience, as well as SEO.

Finally, the links that are being applied, both internal and external, should be reviewed. Broken on-page links worsen navigability and SEO, while external links or backlinks that come from unreliable sites can seriously undermine the trust of search engines towards the site.

It is important that the web page has links, but always guaranteeing their quality.

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