Lighthouse, a tool for auditing sites and web apps

Lighthouse is Google's open source tool for monitoring and auditing web apps. It can be used from Chrome or from console and when we run it, this automated tool attempts to connect to our site a number of times, analyzing its structure, tags and performance.

The focus is on mobile, so Lighthouse emulates a smartphone, even simulating slower connections or offline access. This tool's goal is to help us find and resolve common issues affecting our site in performance, accesibility and user experience.

How does a report work?

A report will give us five feedback categories, with scores from 0 to 100.

1) Performance: how fast our site and its key elements load.

2) Progressive Web Apps: Based on the PWA (Progressive Web Apps) Checklist, it analyzes as many items as we consider, since nowadays Google prioritizes PWAs , that improve mobile performance and positioning.

3) Accesibility: It checks that the necessary requirements for making our users' life easier are met through forms, buttons and image attributes.

4) Recommended practices: It checks the use of recommended practices for web development. Factors that, although they might seem basic, are crucial for building a solid experience.

5) SEO: It generates a not too long report, since there are other specific tools for this.

For its 3.0 version Google emphasized making their tool work faster and generate better, more usable and legible reports.

Why should we pay attention?

• It's a tool that can be used both by developers and regular users.
• Its reports conclude in actions that can be carried out instantly. 
• It allows us to have a better reach performance.
• It's developed and maintained by great developers, part of Google.

Do you have a site to audit? Are you interested in analyzing how your site works? Contact us.