Introduction
In this post, we’ll look at the factors that affect page speed and image compression. We’ll use Lighthouse to see how our own site stacks up against the best practices outlined in Google’s guide.
What is Lighthouse?
- Lighthouse is a tool from Google that helps you improve your site’s performance, accessibility, and usability.
- To run it, visit https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/
- You can enter any URL in the address bar to see how Googlebot accesses it and what its scores are like.
How to use Lighthouse
To run Lighthouse in Chrome, right click any page and choose Inspect. You can find the Lighthouse tab on the same toolbar as Elements, Console and Recorder.
You can also visit https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/ to run it online.
To determine the optimal image size for your site, Google recommends testing different sizes across different devices and browsers. But in general, Google recommends that your images should be between 0.5MB and 2MB in size—which means you don’t need massive images to make your site look good. In fact, if an image is too large on a webpage it can slow down load time significantly—so it’s best to find a happy medium between quality and file size!
Lighthouse scores are divided into four categories: Progressive Web App (PWA) Score: Measures how well you meet certain criteria for building PWAs; e.g., performance metrics such as fast page load time and server response time; whether or not you’re using service workers; whether or not you’re using HTTPS
Conclusion
In this article, I’ve explained the basics of what Lighthouse is and how to use it. I’ve also shown you how to understand image compression and page speed using Lighthouse. It’s a great tool for anyone who wants their website to be faster, more efficient and easier for visitors to load quickly on all devices!