While working on an assignment towards improving the SEO of a website, we came across an open source tool to help you perform complete Website Audit for free.
Yes, It is Lighthouse!
Introduction:
Lighthouse is a Free and Open source tool by Google developed to help Developers build quality web pages which confirms to latest standards of Web development. It is equipped to perform audit by emulating the user from both Mobile as well as Desktop devices.
Lighthouse can be accessed directly in Chrome without the need to install any additional extension. This tool can be used to do audit of live websites in production as well as the webpages in your local development environment. As long as the webpage can be accessed from your Chrome browser, you can easily audit it.
Google Lighthouse |
Features Overview:
At the moment it helps you audit your webpages in the following categories:
- Performance:
- Accessibility:
- Best Practices
- SEO:
- Progressive Web App:
To access the the tool. Follow these steps:
- Open Google Chrome and navigate to the webpage which you would like to audit.
- Now Right Click and select "Inspect" to open the developer tools in Chrome.
- At the end, you may find a pre-installed tab titled "Lighthouse". Click to navigate there.
- In Lighthouse window, you may select the categories for which you want to perform audit and then click on "Generate report" button.
- Within a few seconds depending on your internet connection as well as page load time. (usually less than 30 seconds though). You shall get an audit report displayed within the toolbar.
- Now you can go through each and every observation in detail and correct them in order to improve your Website Quality score.
- If you find a lot of observation which may take time to fix. Then you may download a PDF report and keep it for future analysis and fixes.
Lighthouse tool in Google Chrome Inspect Elements |
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