Optimizing Your Website's Performance With a Google Lighthouse Audit

Improve website performance with Google Lighthouse Audit. Learn how to increase mobile and desktop scores for Performance, A11Y, Best Practices, and SEO.

in Web Dev

Google Lighthouse is a developer tool available in Chrome that provides scores related to Performance, A11Y (Accessibility), Best Practices, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

You run the audit on any site by opening the dev tools and clicking on 'Generate Report' within the Lighthouse tab.

Google Lighthouse Audit Generate Report Screen

 

Blogthedata.com Mobile score

Mobile Score for Google Lighthouse. 98 for performance. 86 for A11y, and 92 for best practices

Blogthedata.com Desktop score

Desktop Score for Google Lighthouse. 100 for performance. 86 for A11y, and 92 for best practices

Not too shabby!

To increase the score, Lighthouse provides a laundry list of 'opportunities' you can leverage. For example, Time to first paint reduces by half a second if I defer loading CSS and JavaScript.

Eliminate render-blocking resources opportunity. Defer CSS and Javascript to improve load time by 0.41 seconds.

In terms of A11Y, it found a few things. I thought I added alt-text to all images, but forgot to add alt-text to my profile photo!

Avatar images do not have alt-text. Google Lighthouse opportunity

I made improvements to the look and feel, but the contrast isn't high enough for certain users. I’ll adjust colors to get something that works for all users and still looks good.

Background and Foreground colors do not produce enough contrast. Google Lighthouse opportunity.

My colleague Karl Frantz says high-performing teams are ones that see A11Y compliance as a design challenge instead of a burden. I agree and am excited about making blogthedata.com more accessible!

Stay tuned for more adventures where I try to improve Lighthouse scores!

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John Solly

Hi, I'm John, a Software Engineer with a decade of experience building, deploying, and maintaining cloud-native geospatial solutions. I currently serve as a senior software engineer at New Light Technologies (NLT), where I work on a variety of infrastructure and application development projects.

Throughout my career, I've built applications on platforms like Esri and Mapbox while also leveraging open-source GIS technologies such as OpenLayers, GeoServer, and GDAL. This blog is where I share useful articles with the GeoDev community. Check out my portfolio to see my latest work!