Using Google Lighthouse to audit any website
Hello, there 👋 I'm Alan!
I love teaching people how to code, and making coding tutorials, one of my big passions is transferring my web development/coding skills and knowledge on to people like you! 🔥
...I'm a 29-year-old Software Developer based in Belfast in Northern Ireland. My current full-time role is Frontend Development Lead where I lead and oversee all the frontend development for our new platform and framework, built in NextJS, React TailwindCSS bundled in a NX mono-repo. I am also the Mobile Team Lead where I develop apps for our company using the Ionic Framework and React javascript.
Throughout this blog, expect to see How to posts about coding on all aspects of HTML, CSS, Javascript (JS), ReactJS, NodeJS, PHP, and even the odd review of cool UI Frameworks or libraries that I've found.
🔔 Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel if you want to catch my quick, easy to follow coding tutorials! 🔔
👉 First of all, what is Google Lighthouse?
It's an automated audit tool aimed at helping you improve web page quality. They provide reports for:
✔️ Performance ✔️ Accessibility ✔️ Best Practices ✔️ Progressive Web App Capabilities ✔️ SEO
👉 Why is this useful?
With any website or web page, it's very important to provide the fastest, highest performing content to the browser as possible. Why? So your site has speed, doesn't lag and doesn't force users to leave your site instantly. It also greatly helps with SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
👉 The Google Lighthouse tool
There is a free tool as a developer we can use called Lighthouse. This lets us audit any website, in those categories outlined above from 0-100 score - it also gives us really in depth explanations as to what is bringing the score down and how to fix each individual issue encountered.
🔥 Try it out
- Go to any webpage using Goggle Chrome
- Right click the page and press Inspect
- On the console tabs, scroll across to Lighthouse
- Click generate report https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse
This is an absolute must use tool if you want to provide top quality, fastest performing webpages that are going to rank high in searches with SEO.
This image is an audit that I've just done on dev community I am building.
