Optimize Lighthouse Scores for Technical SEO Page Speed

Optimize your website's loading speed with Google Lighthouse. Learn how to use Lighthouse for technical SEO page speed optimization.

Google has made page speed as one of the ranking signals, and if your website is slow and sluggish, it’s sure to dent your SEO efforts. Moreover, a slower website can negatively impact your website in many ways, including causing higher bounce rates, lower search engine rankings, poor user experience, and more.

Lighthouse by Google is a powerful free tool that helps webmasters, SEO professionals, and developers to diagnose and improve website’s speed, accessibility, and overall performance drastically. If you are looking to use Lighthouse efficiently to optimize page speed and rectify performance issues on your website, you are at the right place.

In this technical SEO guide, we will walk through the process of how to use Lighthouse to upgrade and maintain your website’s performance.

Understanding Lighthouse

Lighthouse is an open-source, free automated tool developed by Google to improve web pages’ quality. To be more precise, it audits web pages for performance, accessibility, PWA (Progressive Web App) compatibility, best practices, and SEO.

Running your website through Lighthouse can give you a detailed insight into its performance and any issues with it that need improvement or fixes.

How To Use Lighthouse?

Access

Lighthouse can be accessed through multiple ways, most commonly through the Chrome Dev Tools. Simply open Chrome Dev Tool and navigate to the ‘Lighthouse’ tab.

Install Lighthouse extension on your Chrome browser and use the command-line interface to run it on websites or any specific URLs as needed.

Lighthouse Audit

To run a Lighthouse audit, do the following –  

• Enter the URL of the webpage you want to analyze.
• Configure the settings, select the desired categories (Performance, SEO, Best Practices, Accessibility, Progressive Web App) and choose device emulation – For example – mobile, PC, 5G, etc.
• Press on ‘Generate Report’ to start the audit.

Analyze The Report

Once the report is generated, the next step is to analyze the report to measure your website’s performance and check the areas of improvements.

Some of the important metrics in the report are –

Performance Score

This score indicates how well your website is optimized and performing. The higher the score, the better it is.

Performance Category

This section in Lighthouse provides detailed information about various performance metrics, including –  

• First Contentful Paint – Time it takes to render the first piece of content.
• Largest Contentful Paint – The time it takes to load the heaviest element of your website.
• Time to Interactive – The amount of time it takes for your website to be fully interactive.
• Total Blocking Time – The total amount of wait time for your website’s main thread to respond to users’ query.

Identify Issues & Apply Fixes

Depending on the Lighthouse report, there are various ways to apply the fixes and improve your website’s performance. Some of the common ways to fix performance issues are –

• Reduce JavaScript, Minify CSS, and Image Size
• Compress Images
• Leverage Browser Caching (for faster loading)
• Minimize Reder-Blocking Resources
• Enable Lazy Loading
• Reduce third-Party Scripts
• Enable Text Compression
• Reduce Server Response Time

Make sure to re-test your website once the recommended changes are applied to measure improvements. This will give you a clear picture of how well your fixes have worked and if there’s more work to be done to improve performance.

In most cases, you might need to repeat the process several times to improve the Lighthouse score to your satisfaction. Also, don’t forget to monitor your website’s performance periodically to ensure it’s at the optimal level.

Final Thoughts

Using the right tool is the key to SEO success and ensuring your website performs optimally and achieves its goals. Lighthouse is one of the valuable tools you can’t skip when working on optimizing your website and improving its performance.

The tool doesn’t only help optimize page speed, but Lighthouse SEO tips and recommendations can actually pave the roadmap to weed out issues and improve your website’s performance and SEO score drastically.

Keeping a watch on your website regularly through Lighthouse will help with achieving faster loading speed for your website, enhance user experience, and improve your website’s search engine rankings.