We are learning about the impact of the heft of pages on humans, and you’ll realize that over time that SEO professionals are sighing in a personal and collective battle that they must have with the blocker they deal with. The way that people are trying to make their pages faster is something called lighthouse, which is a testing tool for the mobile-first indexing. While the tool is easy and convenient, it can be a bit esoteric, since the overall metric is good for senior stakeholders that are presenting.
Here, we’re going to talk about how you test the performance of lighthouse on your site in order to get good results from this.
First, look at the methodology. A single page doesn’t represent the site, and a fast homepage doesn’t mean fast site. You should test many pages within the site, and get the major page types, templates, and the conversion points you should be going for. You want to run lighthouse on each of these and save that data. Record this onto a list for improvements. You can download the results and utilize the lighthouse viewer to get detailed information.
From here, you want to get your backlog to bite back using the ROI. What that means is, you need to look to handle the backlog that’s there. You want to make sure that you prioritize getting the numbers to investment and ROI, which in turn will help you with improving your results.
So how do you run this? Well first use the built-in functionality that the chrome developer tools have, or download the chrome extension though it’s not recommended. You can also install and run the node command within the tool, and you can run lighthouse tests using this.
You get a lot of metrics with this, such as the time to interactive, speed index, the first contextual point, the CPU idle, and meaningful paint, and the input latency data. So what does this mean? Well, time to interactive is the calculated metric that measures how long for a page to be interactive, which involves useful content and people visiting the page.
Speed index is essentially how long a page loads, and it’s a metric that shows page content. The lower, the better, so you’ll want to make sure it’s as low as possible.
Then there’s first contentful paint, and this is a time that goes from navigation to the time the browser ends up rendering the first bit of content. it’s important for users because it gives feedback on the page loading.
Then there is first CPU idle, which measures when a page is least interactive, and with the page responding to most users as n input of reasonable time.
Finally, there’s first meaningful paint which is when the page’s primary content appears, and it can help with the user-perceived loading experience.
Learning these metrics does help, and in turn, you’ll be able to build your technical SEO with these various factors.
