What is Google Lighthouse?

Google search engine  makes a lot of efforts with the help of bots and algorithms to find the best quality sites and create a positive user experience for users through them by viewing quality websites on the Google search results page, that each of them can be good answers to their questions, the way Google algorithms work is different, and the factors that each of them evaluates are not the same as each other, and they rank websites according to their factors; however, Google has introduced many tools through which various factors can be measured on the site, one of these tools is  Google Lighthouse, through which you can measure the credibility of a site, which we will learn more about in this article.

What is Lighthouse?

Google Lighthouse  is one of the free tools of Google that helps a lot in  improving the site and analyzes the site page  experience, and provides important tips to improve it. In simpler terms, a site should be good enough to attract users, so you should evaluate each of its parameters; Google Lighthouse is provided to analyze factors such as speed, performance, security, SEO, accessibility, etc. so that you can obtain accurate information with just a few clicks through this tool.

Which factors does Google Lighthouse evaluate?

Google Lighthouse generally focuses on five factors including, Performance, Best Practices, Accessibility, SEO, and PWA. In fact, Lighthouse, with a 1 to 100 rating system, lets you evaluate your site pages which helps your improvement, so you can attract more visitors to your website, another criterion that has  a great impact on the ranking  is the loading speed of a site, which can be analyzed through this tool.

As you know, the low loading speed of pages has a negative effect on the site ranking; this problem can be solved through this tool, which generally provides website owners with good information about the performance and quality of the site. As we mentioned above, it evaluates five factors which we will discuss in more detail in the following section.

1- Performance:

In this section, the page loading speed is observed and evaluated, and all the factors which affect the speed are being analyzed in this part.

It generally analyzes six-speed criteria:

- First Meaningful Paint:

Indicates how long it takes for the user to see the main content of the page.

- First Contentful Paint:

As the name implies, this factor is the time it takes for the first photo and text to be displayed for the user.

- Speed Index:

This factor determines the speed at which content is displayed during loading.

- Time to Interactive:

This factor shows the time when the user can fully interact with the page and its content.

- First CPU Idle:

This factor determines when there is a lack of activity on the page.

- Estimated Input Latency:

If the user access time is more than 50 seconds, the site is very slow, in general, once you are provided with this information, there are ways to improve the speed factor. Among the things that this tool offers to speed up the page loading speed, you can change the size and form of photos on the site, compress the existing text, select a photo with smaller sizes, compress  CSS  and disable the ones among those that cannot be used, reducing the time it takes for servers to respond, getting help from timing tests, reducing the time it takes for content to be uploaded, and so on.

2- Best Practices:

In this section, the tool performs the necessary checks whether all the information which have been entered is from a safe source or not; it also checks other things, such as evaluating  JavaScript   libraries.

3- SEO:

In this section, a large number of factors are examined; one of them is the ability to run the site on a mobile device and assess whether the site is crawled by Google bots or not. It should be noted that all items in this section are carefully analyzed, and if your site cannot get a high ranking in this section, you should try to solve the problems of your site, which you are able to use the tips provided by this tool to  improve the site, and get the best results in the field of optimization  and attracting users.

Among the reports provided in this section, in addition to the fact that the site has no title, the meta description is not specified, the appropriate font for the site is not selected, the linking is not done correctly, the page has an invalid HTTP code, the page is not indexed, and all the things that play a role in optimizing the site, which by observing all these points, you can improve the speed of the site and increase the quality of it to be seen at the top of the search engine results page like Google.

4- Accessibility:

This tool in this section examines the ability of a website to respond to people with physical disabilities, and accordingly gives a score between zero and one hundred to the site; you should take action according to the point that has been given to you to know and make the site suitable for people who are not able to use the content of the site easily so that users can gain a better experience and share this experience with their friends.

In general, the following points can be observed in this section:

- There may be visually impaired people who want to use your website information, in which case you must  optimize the site  in such a way that the page reader tools can easily identify these sections and execute the audio form of it.

-People who visit your site may have difficulty in recognizing colors correctly, in which case the color management of the website should be done in the best possible way for such people to  gain a good experience in using the site.

- Put codes on each page of the site so that different people can access the sections of the site very easily.

5- PWA:

PWA, which stands for  Progressive Web Apps, is actually one of the factors which are evaluated by this tool.

How to install Google Lighthouse?

One of the easiest ways to use this tool is to install it in the Chrome browser, then go to your desired page, click on the Generate Report option and see the page loading process. Finally, you can see a report of all the tests that this tool has done in different sections.

Important tip:

The  Google Lighthouse tool   is one of the most complete and powerful tools through which you can test different parts of the site and evaluate the quality of each part, but the only downside to this tool is that it can only be run at the URL level.

In addition, applying all the tips on a site and earning high scores in different parts of this tool is a difficult task that requires expertise in this area, so you must get help from experts in this field to improve the quality of the site; as a result, you will get the best results.

Last word:

In general, the Google Lighthouse tool measures different parts of the site and examines the site from Google's point of view, and gives you a lot of information about user's experience, as you know the user experience is becoming an important factor and should be considered as an important factor to website owners, by using this tool,  you can make progress and reach the top rankings on the Google search  results page.

The positive points of using this tool, as we have mentioned, is that this tool performs all the analyses completely free and another point is that it has a high speed, and if you pay attention to the points mentioned in this article, you will realize the importance of this tool in  optimizing website  as well as increasing the traffic to your website by attracting more users because of providing them with good opportunities such as the ones we have mentioned in this article.