Website Performance Accessibility & SEO Testing Using Google Lighthouse

Test Website Performance, Accessibility, & SEO Using Google Lighthouse

All of our projects require performance, accessibility and sometimes SEO testing to obtain results to compare against original baseline numbers to ensure we are at least meeting the existing standards.

We use a series of tools to perform these tasks. These tools often have a cost associated and are at times not the most user friendly to use. This blog post will be focused on how anyone can easily utilize Google Lighthouse to run these tests to see results for yourself.

What Is Google Lighthouse?

Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. You can run it against any web page. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO and more.

You can run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools, from the command line, or as a Node module. You give Lighthouse a URL to audit, it 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.

Google Lighthouse is not meant to replace paid testing tools nor will it provide the same results. Lighthouse however should give you a great starting point.

How To Use Google Lighthouse?

Run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools.

Lighthouse powers the Audits panel of Chrome DevTools. To run a report:

1. Download Google Chrome for Desktop.
2. In Google Chrome, go to the URL you want to audit. You can audit any URL on the web.
3. Navigate to the control panel at the top right using the following icon: More Tools -> Developer Tools -> Lighthouse tab
4. DevTools shows you a list of audit categories. Leave them all enabled or select the individual one you are interested in seeing.
5. Select whether you want to review desktop or mobile device results.
6. Click Generate a report.
7. After 30 to 60 seconds, Lighthouse gives you a report on the page.

What To Do With Google Lighthouse Report

Printing Or Saving Report

If you wish to save or print the report click the hamburger icon in the top right corner of the report and choose the applicable option.

Interacting With The Report

You can click on an individual category such as SEO to understand more about the results of the audit and some tips from Google on how to improve the score.

You can also expand to view the tests that were passed or tests that were not applicable.

How Do I Improve My Score?

Reach out to Fishtank to improve these scores. We can help with ensuring you get the best scores possible for performance, accessibility and SEO. We can also utilize our own tool sets to compare against the Google Lighthouse results.