Lighthouse is a Google developed tool that allows website owners to improve the quality of webpages on their website. The tool audits pages for performance, accessibility, SEO, and more. It also offers suggestions for improving these aspects. ActiveComply automatically incorporates Lighthouse scores for each individual website page into WebCompass.
How Does It Work
Lighthouse can run it against any web page, public or requiring authentication. To begin, users can give Lighthouse a URL to audit. It will then run a series of audits against the page and generate a report on how well the page did. From there, users can review 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.
Performance
For this report, Lighthouse measures how quickly a website loads and how quickly a user can access its features. The main focus of this score is Speed! Metrics that factor into this score include:
first contentful paint: the amount of time at which the first piece of text or imagery renders for viewers.
largest contentful paint: the amount of time the largest element (text, image, video, widget, etc.) renders for viewers.
total blocking time: measures the amount of time that a page is blocked from a user’s input, such as a mouse-click.
cumulative layout shift: measures the number of layout shifts that occur when a user access a page.
speed index: time indicator of who long it takes for the content of a page to fully load.
Common Opportunities for improving this score include: serving images in next-gen formats, reducing initial server response time, reducing unused JavaScript, eliminating render-blocking resources, properly sizing images, and reducing unused CSS.
Have a green score? Congrats! A score between 90-100 indicates that your page is well optimized.
Have a red score? Anything below 90 indicates a significant amount of resources on the page are slowing things down.