Google introduces hundreds of new algorithms in a year and keeps on updating the previous ones in a hope to help the websites and give the users an enhanced experience “wherever they are”. Google realizes the fact that in present times the web is capable enough to provide consumers with an excellent experience. If one website is not able to give the user an enhanced experience then some other site will. Google recently has come up with a new tool that will help the websites review their performance. This tool gives a detailed report about the areas that need improvement and the areas that are working perfect. It would also guide the developers on what actions could be taken to improve the score and faulty areas of the website.
This tool can be used by anyone and everyone at Web.dev as it is in open beta and check their websites performance. This tool has been termed as “Lighthouse”. One just needs to go the website Web.dev, click on “Test my Site” and enter the website address that you want to get the details for. Once the website’s URL is entered it will start analyzing the site and will show the scores along with areas that require improvement. There’s an option of downloading the detailed report as well and wherever the changes are made they will be displayed on the tool after 24hrs. This tool will display many details like:
Performance: In this section it would include lot of parameters to define the performance of a website like its content, images, page load speed, whether the pages are interactive or not from the user’s point of view, if there are multiple redirections and many more details.
Progressive Web Applications: In this section it will provide audit reports for the web applications like if the web application launches properly from the home screen of the mobile device even when offline, if the content is sized properly for the mobile screens, if the pages load fast enough on 3G networks and various other details
Best Practices: This section looks for the factors related to HTTPS usage that are deprecated and affect the performance of a website.
SEO: This section checks for the best practices that would make a website discoverable. Eg. a document should have a unique and good quality description, a document should have a title that decides its relevance, it checks for the canonical issues, checks for the applicable font sizes and many other factors.
Accessibility: This section checks the common problems obstruct the users from accessing a website’s content like every button has an accessible name or not, every image should have an alt tag that will have the text description of the contents of that image and other things.
This tool will prove beneficial not only for the developers but for everyone who is into digital marketing as it will guide us for the best practices that should be followed to get a good ranking and increase the search traffic for a website. Besides this Google also has a 32-page guide for the best SEO practices that helps website become discoverable and prevent it from being penalized.
