How to Use Google Lighthouse to Improve Website Speed
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According to Google, increasing your page load time from 1 second to 10 seconds will boost your bounce rate by 123 percent.
Fortunately, the tech behemoth has since provided a set of useful tools to aid in improving page load speed and overall user experience. Google Lighthouse is one such tool.
What is Google Lighthouse?
Google Lighthouse is a free, open-source application that analyses your website’s performance and gives a variety of metrics and insights to help you enhance the user experience. The tool is easy to use and will provide you with a report on all of the relevant Core Web Vitals information as well as some actionable items to improve several aspects of your site, such as SEO and web accessibility, in just a few seconds, allowing you to assess exactly how your site is performing.
This score is computed by weighing the numerous performance measures and provides a complete picture of how well your website is operating. There is a really handy calculator accessible if you want to learn more about how the score is computed.
It’s very important that you run a Lighthouse audit on your WordPress site because it can bring to light certain performance weaknesses with your site that negatively impact the user experience and give you the insights you need to turn those around optimize things.
What Are Core Web Vitals?
Core Online Vitals are a set of measures established by Google to assess the page speed and overall user experience of web sites. The Core Web Vitals algorithm update, which assesses a website’s Core Web Vitals metrics, was launched by Google in 2021.
For website owners who want to deliver a pleasant user experience and rank better on Google, these indicators have become increasingly crucial.
The three most important Core Web Vitals are:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): the amount of time it takes for the most important material to load above the fold. With this comprehensive guide, you can learn everything there is to know about LCP.
FID (First Input Delay) : is the time it takes for a page to reply when a user interacts with it. Check out our FID primer.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): is the amount of material that shifts while the page loads. Here’s where you can learn more about CLS.
You can also read the full article on ” WHAT ARE CORE WEB VITALS? 7 WAYS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE “
What Google Lighthouse Can Tell You
Google Lighthouse may be used to assess your Core Web Vitals. The tool evaluates your website based on the typical user’s device and connection. You may, however, tell the programme whatever device and relationship you want it to simulate for your experiments. These tests will reveal which phases of page load need to be optimised in order to deliver a decent user experience.
How to Make the Most of Google Lighthouse
Google Lighthouse is available as a Chrome extension or as part of the Chrome Devtools.
Lighthouse will provide a report on five key categories after conducting the audit on your webpage:
1. Performance : Images and resources are examples of items that slow down your page’s performance.
2. Accessibility : Accessibility audits determine how accessible your material is to users, including assistive technology use.
3. Best Practices : Identifies any web development element that does not follow current guidelines and best practice.
4. SEO : identifies the most important SEO flaws with the webpage, although it is not exhaustive.
5. Progressive Online App : displays the performance of your web application as well as any implementation issues.
Speed Tips from Lighthouse
1) Eliminate render-blocking
Visitors’ browsers must request, download, and execute external CSS and JavaScript files every time they visit a page. Render-blocking is what it implies. Before they can see the items they wish to buy, much alone add them to basket, your visitors must wait for their browser to process every render-blocking file.
CSS and JavaScript are strong programming languages. However, they can cause a site to load slowly.
To show relevant page content or enable key functionality, some JavaScript and CSS files do not need to load at the start of the process. Bounce rates are increased by loading all of these non-essential files before the content displays.
Include crucial JavaScript components inline in the HTML wherever possible. For noncritical items, use the async or defer properties to delay their loading after the more crucial components.
Critical CSS can also be inlined to save time by avoiding a second call to the server. The media query string can also be used by devices to parse CSS files. Each stylesheet link in the HTML should have its own media tag in this technique, so that the browser only executes what is required for the user’s device.
Deliver smaller payloads
To reduce file size even more, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript may all be minified and compressed.
Minification is the process of reducing the number of code characters while maintaining the browser’s processing speed. Comments, carriage returns, formatting, and superfluous strings are all instances of minification.
Similar to a zipping tool, compression decreases the size of a file. Compression utilities like Brotli and Gzip squeeze text files into smaller packages without altering their content or functionality.
Optimize Images
It’s not about lowering image quality when it comes to optimization. JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP are high-quality visual formats with better compression rates, which means they load faster.
Consider using responsive images, which define the picture size for each page load. It entails producing several sizes of each picture and serving the smallest for each page. It can cut seconds off the load speed of a site with a lot of images.
If you have the resources, a content delivery network that optimises photos may make this process a lot easier.
Extend browser Caching
Your visitor’s browser has the capability of temporarily storing a file. This is useful for returning to a page and for files that are utilised throughout the site. Until the cache term for that file expires, the browser uses its local, cached copy every time it wants to load that file. The browser then requests a fresh version, which it caches again.
For people who are here for the first time, this is useless. Those who make it through the initial click, as well as those who return to your site, benefit from it.
What happens if you need to make a major change to your website? Your development team may clear the old cache in order to update the file, ensuring that the browser sees the updated picture, text, and CSS.
Saving Lighthouse Reports
Lighthouse reports cannot be printed from the console. However, the findings are available for download. Unfortunately, the download is not in a text format that can be read. GitHub, on the other hand, provides a solution for viewing. Go to GitHub and open this page. Drag the Lighthouse file from your file manager into your browser’s GitHub page. The report is shown on the page, together with clickable assistance links and the standard printing and saving options provided by your browser.