WHAT'S A GOOGLE CHROME LIGHTHOUSE REPORT AND HOW CAN SOMEBODY USE IT?

October 20, 2022

Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. You can run it against any web page, public or requiring authentication. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO and more. You can run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools, by right clicking on the preferred page ,clicking inspect, and after that clicking lighthouse on the DevTools window, Chrome offers. You can choose whether you want to generate a report for a mobile device or a laptop. Lighthouse then runs a series of audits against the page, and then it generates a report on how well the page did. From there, use the failing audits as indicators on how to improve the page. Each audit has a reference doc explaining why the audit is important, as well as how to fix it.

For example, let's generate a GCLR for my personal website steliospapakosmas.gr (right click -> inspect -> Lighthouse -> Analyze page load):

The first thing popping is the four scores displaying on the Lighthouse board. The first one is Performance and it runs audits that examine how fast the web app is being served to the user. The second one is Accessibility and runs audits that test if the web app has infrastructures for users that have disabilities so that they are able to access the webpage unconditionally. Also important as the last two is the Best Practices score, where Google examines whether the programmer has used the best possible ways to build this app. At last, the SEO score shows whether the programmer has built foundations for SEO Campaigns.

Lighthouse is a very powerful tool as it doesn't only calculate those metrics but shares valuable info in order for the score to become better. In that way programmers are able to improve their apps and business owners to check if the work has been done correctly.

This report after all is a small indicator on how Google values your website and where it will index it when it is crawled. As you can see i get an almost perfect score as i payed attention to what the Report suggests should be done and follow those foundations to all of my projects.