What are those green lines on your site?
Those green lines at the top of this page (and every page on this site)? Those are actually bar graphs indicating the Lighthouse scores for this page, or whichever page you happen to be looking at. (If you hover over, you’ll get a bit more information.)
Lighthouse is “an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO and more.”
Because there are many aspects to creating an excellent experience for your website’s visitors, Google created Lighthouse to assist developers (who care about excellence) with improving performance, accessibility, and SEO, and following best practices.
So why does it matter to you as a website owner? Well, if Lighthouse, a public, open-source tool, can calculate scores based on important aspects of your website, imagine what Google’s search engine algorithm is capable of calculating. And chances are, whatever they’re calculating, that’s going right into determining where you website ranks in search results. Especially with the recent introduction of core web vitals, you want to do everything you can to get high scores.
And that’s what I’ve done on my own website: I’ve done everything I can to score as near to perfect as I can. As for the green bars on every page? That’s to show you I know about and develop websites with those things in mind from the start.
Photo by Mercedes Mehling on Unsplash