Google launched a new tool for website owners – Lighthouse. It shows how well your site performs and how good is the SEO of your site. Yes, you read correctly, the tool measures how good is your SEO.
The tool is now in a beta version and you can check it out here. It is very simple in use. You just add the URL of your site and in seconds get the report, that will measure your site’s:
- Performance (Audits for metrics like first paint and time to interactive to determine lag);
- PWA (Assesses your page against the baseline Progressive Web App Checklist);
- Best Practices (Looks for everything from HTTPS usage to correct image aspect ratios, so technical aspect of your site);
- SEO (how your page is optimized for search engine results ranking.);
- Accessibility (Checks for common issues that may prevent users from accessing your content).
The score scale is from 1-100, where 90-100 is perfect, and 0-49 means your site needs improvements. And the best part, the tool also shows you what you need to improve in order for your site to perform better.
The tool measures your Speed Index, how interactive is your web page or when the primary content of your site starts to be visible for users. It shows a lot of technical issues as well, for example, if your site uses HTTPs correctly, if your code has CSS files or Javascript libraries.
You can see if the images are displayed with the correct aspect ratio or if your site colors have a proper contrast as well as many other important things, like mobile-friendliness and structured data validity.
As you may know from before, Google has separate tools where you can check your site mobile and desktop speed or validate if your structured data doesn’t have mistakes. The new tool shows everything in one place. It is built not only for webmasters and SEO experts but also for website owners, who don’t have necessary deep knowledge for fixing the issues. They can just check the site on their own, and then hire or instruct in-house specialists for making corrections.
Don’t expect a lot from SEO section. It estimates your site general SEO, and doesn’t give you deep analysis. However, its speed index is very helpful.
