The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Using Lighthouse

You’ve heard of Lighthouse, that mysterious tool that promises to make your sites faster, but you’ve been too intimidated to try it out. We get it. Any new tool feels daunting at first. But listen, you clicked on this post for a reason. Deep down you know your site could be running better, and you’re tired of losing visitors to slow load times. We’re here to show you that working with Lighthouse isn’t scary at all.

In fact, it’s downright fun once you get the hang of it. We’ll walk you through everything from installation to interpreting those cryptic performance reports. By the end, you’ll be able to make your site fly using Lighthouse’s speedy superpowers. Ready to turn your site into a speed demon? Then let’s shine some light and do this!

What Is Lighthouse?

Lighthouse is an open-source web project by Google that provides automated audits, performance metrics, and best practices for web apps. It allows you to add auditing tools to your workflow to improve performance, accessibility, and SEO.

Think of Lighthouse as your digital assistant for optimizing websites. It analyzes web pages and web apps against a set of guidelines for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, and SEO. It then generates reports to help you diagnose and fix common issues.

Some of the key benefits of using Lighthouse include:

• Performance — Lighthouse checks metrics like load speed, unused CSS and JavaScript, image sizes, and more to help your site run as fast as possible.
• Accessibility — Lighthouse scans for common accessibility problems to help make your site usable for people with disabilities.
• PWA — Lighthouse checks if your site meets the baseline Progressive Web App criteria, like having a service worker, web app manifest, and secure origin.
• SEO — Lighthouse checks for SEO best practices like optimized images, viewport settings, page redirection, and sitemap.xml to help search engines index and rank your site.

You have a few options for using Lighthouse:

• Chrome DevTools — The easiest way is to run Lighthouse audits directly in the Chrome DevTools. Just open DevTools, go to the “Lighthouse” panel, and run an audit.
• Chrome Extension — Install the Lighthouse Chrome Extension and right-click any page to run an audit.
• npm Module — Install Lighthouse as an npm module and run it programmatically from the command line or as a build step.
• Web Page Test — WebPageTest is a free website speed test tool that uses Lighthouse for performance and PWA auditing.

Lighthouse is an invaluable resource for improving your web projects. Run regular audits to catch common issues, then make the recommended fixes to build a faster, more accessible, and SEO-friendly site.

Getting Started With Lighthouse in Chrome

To use the Lighthouse auditing tool in Chrome, first make sure you have the latest version of Chrome installed. Then, follow these steps:

• Open the Chrome DevTools. You can do this by right-clicking on a web page and selecting “Inspect” or by pressing Command+Option+I (Mac) or Control+Shift+I (Windows, Linux).
• Select the “Lighthouse” tab. This will open the Lighthouse panel in the DevTools.
• Choose which audits you want to run. By default, Lighthouse will run the “Performance”, “Progressive Web App”, “Best Practices” and “Accessibility” audits. You can uncheck any of these to disable them or check additional audits like “SEO” to enable them.
• Click “Generate report”. Lighthouse will then analyze the web page and provide scores and recommendations for the enabled audits.
• View the results. The results page will show scores out of 100 for each audit, as well as specific recommendations and issues found on the page. Expand each audit to see details and how to fix any problems.
• Improve and re-run Lighthouse. Make changes to the web page based on Lighthouse’s recommendations and then re-run Lighthouse to see improved scores and continue optimizing.
• Save Lighthouse reports (optional). If you want to track performance over time or share reports with others, you can click the “Export” button to download a JSON or HTML file with the full Lighthouse results.

Lighthouse is a powerful tool for improving and optimizing the performance, accessibility, SEO and more of your web pages. By running it regularly on your site in Chrome DevTools, you’ll get actionable insights to build a better web experience for your users. If you have any other questions about using Lighthouse, check out the web.dev/lighthouse documentation.

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