What is Google Lighthouse and why is it important for websites?

Google Lighthouse is an open-source performance analysis tool developed by Google. It measures criteria such as performance, SEO, accessibility, and best practices for websites. Lighthouse is important because it helps businesses identify technical issues, improve website speed, and create a better user experience, which also supports higher search engine rankings.

Why is Google Lighthouse important for SEO?

Lighthouse provides data on page speed, mobile compatibility, and other performance factors that directly affect SEO rankings. By improving the scores in Lighthouse, your website becomes more user-friendly and gains better visibility in Google search results.

What are the main analysis criteria of Google Lighthouse?

Lighthouse evaluates websites under five main categories: Performance, Progressive Web App (PWA), SEO, Accessibility, and Best Practices. These metrics help create a high-quality, fast, and optimized website.

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What is Google LightHouse? | Why Use It?

02/02/2024

Google LightHouse

PageSpeed Insight, or PSI, which has been used for many years for website performance measurement, started to become insufficient on its own due to its focus on desktop-oriented indexing. With Google prioritizing the shift to mobile indexing, both users and Google began a new search in this area. To respond to this search, Google has introduced its new performance analysis tool, Google LightHouse.

What is Google LightHouse?

Google has released the LightHouse performance analysis tool to improve the quality of websites and search indexes. Google LightHouse, which can be used with Chrome developer tools and as a Chrome extension, is a completely open-source and developable performance analysis tool.

Google-Lighthouse-Dashboard-and-Performance-Scores

What You Need to Know About Google LightHouse

There is a small difference between the analysis tools designed as a Google Development Tool and a Google Chrome Extension. This difference is as follows: The Google LightHouse designed as a Chrome Extension includes an "SEO" section, which can help you analyze your site's SEO performance.
It allows you to analyze not only your own sites but also competitor sites.
Extensions that block Google codes, such as AdBlock and AdBlock PRO, can cause the Google LightHouse Google Extension module to malfunction.
On Google LightHouse, analyses are done page by page, so you must ensure the analysis of not only the homepage but all of your content.
Google LightHouse, which does not yet have Turkish language support, will soon make Turkish language support available.

Example-of-a-Google-Lighthouse-Mobile-Performance-Report

What are the Analysis Criteria for LightHouse?

First, it is worth noting that all criteria are not related to SEO, and many factors are taken into account, from design to page load speed. Since Google aims for indexes to be fast-loading and high-quality websites, content alone may be insufficient. At this point, you can use simpler and faster-loading designs on your websites based on your analyses.

The main criteria are as follows;

Performans
Progressive Web App (PWA)
SEO
Acessibility (Erişilebilirlik)
Best Practices (En İyi Uygulamalar)