What is Google Lighthouse?

Lighthouse is an automated and open-source tool provided by Google to web developers. It improves the quality, correctness, and overall performance of their websites and applications. It conducts audits in a few major areas that are best practices, performance, accessibility, and Progressive Web Applications. Google Lighthouse works for improving a possible user experience and developer bottlenecks in these domains. Users can run it against any application or website whether it is public or requires authentication. They can use it as a Chrome extension, as a node module, or from within Chrome DevTools as well.

When you audit a webpage, Lighthouse runs some tests against that page. Then it accordingly generates the reports on how well the page performed. From those reports, you can check the failing tests. Then you can use them as indicators of what you can do to improve your webpage or application. Lighthouse provides a lot of tips to the developers to improve the page load performance, for instance, enabling text compression or reducing render-blocking scripts. The Lighthouse team continuously ships new audits for the users to give them useful advice for making their websites faster.

Why Google Lighthouse is important for your websites?

Now that you are aware of what Google Lighthouse is, you might question why it is so important and why the scores matter for your websites?

Well, the answer is simple. We all know that performance improvement is a priority for any website or web application. So, when you use Google Lighthouse it provides you a report with the areas mentioned where your website needs improvements. When you optimize the performance with the help of the report for mobile devices, the performance of your website on desktop and laptop browsers improves as well at the same time. Users nowadays are increasingly visiting websites on mobile devices. Thus, your website must offer a smooth and quick experience for your visitors.

Using Lighthouse will further improve the searchability of your web apps and websites. After all, what good a website is doing if nobody is visiting it? A better performing site is rewarded with higher search engine rankings. Ultimately, using Lighthouse gives your website an advantage over your different competitions which is why it is so important for developers. It makes a great difference.

Benefits of using Google Lighthouse

Lighthouse doesn’t claim to test each part of your website but it prescribes more of a top to bottom testing of specific components such as SEO and accessibility, as discussed above. It tries the website design angles that Google considers as significant steps. After you get the outcomes, it guides you to use the most proficient methods to improve your performance by fixing the issues. This ought to bring better rankings on the search engines. Here are a few benefits and reasons for why you should use Lighthouse in your site testing routine.

Actionable Items:

When an issue or bug is identified, Lighthouse gives you significant things so that you can improve the execution. The reports generated will point at explicit segments and also lines of code that need to be fixed or improved.

Continuous Updates:

It goes through several continuous updates. Its developers make sure that the most recent web metrics are being tried. Users don’t need to worry about utilizing obsolete rules as people who make the rules are the ones who are refreshing the program.

Convenience:

If you are new to this website architecture then SEO can be confusing for you. And, most of us don’t have the knowledge to run complex testing devices. In that case, the lighthouse is pretty easy to use. Users can examine their sites in just a single tick.

Anyone can use it:

Lighthouse is a versatile tool. It can be used without touching the build pipeline in the Chrome extension. Both developers and the non-technical audience can use it easily. Moreover, it enables Quality assurance teams and the product managers to easily and quickly access and monitors the performance of websites.

Performance Advice:

Building analytics software can be challenging. But fortunately, the lighthouse provides the metrics and actionable reports. They refer to certain DOM elements, infrastructure setup, and CSS collectors. Now, users don’t need to worry about navigating through unknown waters. Therefore, performance becomes approachable.

Built by best developers:

Lighthouse provides a significant advantage over other performance tooling projects. Its developers not only have a great amount of experience and expertise but they also have direct access to API creators that are important for performance tracking and benchmarking.

Summary

Performance is a very important part of a better user experience; still, people overlook it. Lighthouse is an amazingly useful suite that empowers developers to make the user experience of their products better. It not only provides metrics but also human-language advice which has made it an indispensable part of a lot of processes. No matter whether you are building a progressive web app or not, it is always compulsory to make a quality assurance checklist.

However, speeding up a website is not an easy task. It is most of the time very difficult to recognize what is slowing down your website. The problem can be anything ranging from wrong codes to large page elements or images. If you need to diagnose and fix your issues fast, then Google’s PageSpeed Insights is the right tool for you. By the end of this article, you’ll have a clear understanding of what is PageSpeed Insights and what is its importance.

What is PageSpeed Insights?

Google team has always been on the frontline of web performance tooling and optimization. There is a Google tool available that is suitable for your every need. Over the last ten years, they have created performance tools that are dedicated to various types of users ranging from developers and marketers to website owners and amateurs. PageSpeed Insights or PSI is a great tool by Google that reports the performance of a website or a page on both the device – mobile and desktop. Moreover, it provides suggestions to the user on how their page can be improved. This tool provides both the field and the lab data about a page.

Lab data debug performance issues as it collects in a controlled environment. But, it might not capture the real-world bottlenecks. Field data capture true and real-world user-experience. But, it has a limited set of metrics. PageSpeed Insights for good reasons is one of the most internationally used page speed measurement tools.

Why is it so important?

The speed of the page plays an important role in the ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. It also plays a vital role in user-experience. Pages that take a lot of time in loading increases the bounce rate and further reduce the average session duration. As a result, it greatly decreases interactions and conversions. This is the reason why it is so important to diagnose what is causing the pages on your website to slow down. It is also important to use effective methods and tools to optimize the speed of your page. After implementing these optimizations, the ranking will improve through a better user experience and thus your overall important conversion rate will improve.

PageSpeed Insights tool does an overall performance analysis on some special metrics of your page and gives the PageScore result accordingly. This means that the better the score is, the users can assume that the better shape their website is in. A satisfactory score is a good indicator of the well-being of a site in the eyes of Google. A website that has faster speed has higher chances that it will be loved by Google. It proves that PageSpeed Insights is important for any website as it focuses the people’s efforts that ensure their website loads as fast as it can.

Benefits of PageSpeed Insights

Google’s PageSpeed Insights wants every website to have a responsive design because it wants to give a better user-experience to everyone. It has a lot of benefits that it provides to developers to make their websites better than before. Let’s go over its benefits.

• Your patience wears thin if you click on a website and it takes forever to load. You will leave that website immediately and you’ll click on another website that will load your answers fast. When someone clicks the back button before the website loads, it is a bounce. And, nobody would want that happen with their website. When the bounce rate increases, it becomes obvious that the visitors stay on it for a shorter time which makes it unlikely to convert. PageSpeed helps the websites with this thing by helping them load faster and improving performance. When fewer people will leave, their stay time will increase which means that they’ll engage, interact, and view more pages. These are the ranking signals by Google and it brings to our next benefit: increased rankings.
• An increased page speed increases the number of pages that Google can index and crawl. And, the more the pages Google indexes, there are higher chances of your website having an individual page ranking. Longer load times apparently reduce the bandwidth which decreases the number of pages that Google will crawl.
• It is easy to understand and use. People don’t need to be from a technical background, anyone can use it.
• It is straight to the point and provides optimized assets such as CSS, JS, and images.
• PageSpeed Insights gives the best reports that help the developers improve their website performance greatly. Further, it has a desktop and mobile assessment.

Wrapping things up

Everyone wants their websites to be perfect from every perspective. Every icon, image, and element needs to be top-level. But often people are left with slower websites even after using the best practices. Speed always plays a big part because nobody wants to wait 5 seconds for the site to load so they click back and select the next result. It should be the developer’s main priority to optimize a website perfectly. PageSpeed Insights is a tool that helps your websites overcome such difficulties. Thus, scoring a perfect 100% score on this tool can always give your website the boost that it needs to be successful.

H1 tag and SEO

One of the most complex tasks that a search engine needs to do is to understand what a page is all about. To do this task in the most efficient and fastest way, it makes use of data from various signals. One such signal is the H1 tag on the page. When search engines go through the content of a page, they read the codes in HTML and determine which sentences are enclosed in which heading tags (h1, h2, etc.). It considers them as a characteristic of a particular page. So, people can easily make the search engines understand what their page is about by including keywords in their H1 tag.

Besides, there is one more reason why headings are an important part of SEO. It is because they make it easier for the users to navigate through the page. The H1 tag heading pretty much clears them that what the page is about just by a glance. Moreover, the rest of the subheadings further help them to understand what each section of the content consists of. In short, if a business or a website wants to be found on the internet, it needs to follow such simple SEO rules and must have good knowledge of SEO because these small things matter a lot.

H1 tag SEO best practices

You might not know this but, essentially, you are helping your website rank better in a search engine. You can do this just by having one H1 tag on your page and following its best practices. It is not the strongest thing for search engine optimization. However, it is still very significant for SEO as it tells both the search engines and the website visitors that what your page is all about. For instance, including an H1 tag on your website can help improve the user experience. Thus, it ultimately helps improve the ranking of your website in the search results.

Now that we have clearly understood how H1 works, let us see what we can do to write the best H1 headings that might benefit your page in SEO. Given below are some best practices that you should follow for it –

• Use full forms instead of short forms
• Use keywords
• Avoid long headings
• It should be similar or a bit different from the page heading
• Make sure the H1 tag is visible to everyone
• Use one H1 per page
• It should match the user intent
• Style it differently

Example

Now, let us help you understand better by taking an example of how it makes a huge difference for every website.

PageSpeed Insights Test Results for  Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management Cloud Tutorial

LigthHouse Test Results for Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management Cloud Tutorial

In the above two images, the result of the analysis from PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse are given. It is for both desktop mode and mobile mode. The performance scores in desktop mode and mobile mode are 84 and 83 respectively. This score means that the page has an average performance with an average speed to load the website. This is the case when we took “Oracle Fusion SCM Cloud Tutorial” as the H1 tag for the page. This happened because we wrote SCM in our heading rather than writing its full form that is Supply Chain Management.

On the other hand, this is not the case when we write its full form in the heading i.e. Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management Cloud Tutorial. We can see the difference in the above two images as the score increases to 97 and 96 respectively for both desktop and mobile.

This proves that search engines like Google places higher importance on the H1 tags of a website. This is to improve usability, especially mobile usability which helps in improving the overall speed and performance. Thus, tagging the heading of your page or content as an H1 tag in your website markup makes it easy to read by Google. This means it is mandatory for better SEO.

Test it. Trust it – https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsmconsultant.com%2Foracle-fusion-scm-cloud-tutorial%2F&tab=mobile

Conclusion

Optimizing the headings and the H1 tags is one of the things you certainly need to do. But, it’s not the end of it. Unlike other factors of SEO, an H1 tag is a factor that you can easily control. And, if you use correct optimization, then it can make a difference in your website rankings. If your website already has headings that are not coded in the H1 tag, then it’s unlikely that the H1 tag will make any significant difference to your SEO strategy. But a good SEO is all about checking boxes right? So, why not check this box now that you know it goes beyond just SEO?