Boost SEO Performance with Google Lighthouse Audit Tool

SEO (Search engine optimization) performance is important because it's simply quality control for websites—For websites, good SEO performance means good for their social promotion.

In early 2018, Google released an SEO tool called Lighthouse that offers insight on how to improve the quality of your pages.The audit tool reports details on how visitors interact with different elements of your pages and what issues need to be fixed.

Google Lighthouse Audit Tool

In a  nutshell, Lighthouse is

• An open-source
• A webpage auditing tool that reports on a few key factors for each web page, which include
• Overall performance 
• Accessibility 
• Best practices 
• Progressive web applications
• Can be run in different ways:
• in Chrome DevTools
• from the command line, or 
• as a Node module

The easiest way to use Lighthouse is to install the latest version of Chrome and launch the DevTools from it.  In this article, we will cover more details on this way of using Lighthouse.

Chrome DevTools

This may be the simplest option when it comes to running the Google Lighthouse audit. To launch the DevTools, you do:

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. Open Chrome DevTools.
• You can open Chrome DevTools from Chrome's menu , click into “More tools” and then click into “Developer Tools.”
4. Click the Audits tab.
5. Click Perform an audit. DevTools shows you a list of audit categories. Leave them all enabled.
6. Click Run audit. After 60 to 90 seconds, Lighthouse gives you a report on the page.

Sample Report

Performance

Besides SEO audit, you can also get a Performance audit report.  For example, below shows you the Opportunities and Diagnostics of Performance based on audit results:

Analysis of Performance

• Has significant main thread work & JavaScript boot-up time is too high
• Recommendation: delivering smaller JS payloads
• Consider reducing the time spent parsing, compiling and executing JS. You may find delivering smaller JS payloads helps with this.
• Consider delivering critical JS/CSS inline and deferring all non-critical JS/styles
• Uses an excessive DOM size
• Recommendation: reducing DOM size to be fewer than ~1,500 nodes per page
• Browser engineers recommend pages contain fewer than ~1,500 DOM nodes. The sweet spot is a tree depth < 32 elements and fewer than 60 children/parent element. A large DOM can increase memory usage, cause longer style calculations, and produce costly layout reflows

References

1. How Google Lighthouse Audit Works