Know Your Numbers
In today’s digital age, understanding the performance and SEO of your website is key to achieving online success. That’s why I’m excited to introduce you to an essential tool that every website owner should use: Google Lighthouse.
Auditing your website helps pinpoint areas that need improvement, providing a clear path to optimize for performance, accessibility, user experience, and SEO. These metrics give you a baseline from which to grow and enhance your site’s effectiveness.
Watch the Step-By-Step Guide on YouTube.
Introducing Google Lighthouse
Google Lighthouse is a free, user-friendly tool designed to audit your web pages. It assesses performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO, offering actionable suggestions for improvement. Watch the video below for a detail step-by-step guide. Try to follow along to perform audits on your website.
Step-by-Step Guide:
- On your laptop or desktop computer (not mobile or tablet), open your Chrome browser, and then open the Incognito mode by clicking the three dots at the top right corner of Chrome, and select “New Incognito Window“.
You don’t have to use Incognito mode to run these audits, but I’d recommend it so that your personal browsing history or extensions won’t affect the analysis. - On the Incognito Chrome browser tab, navigate to the web page you want to audit.
- Right-click anywhere on the page and select “Inspect.”
Or if you are using a Windows computer, just simply press the F12 key, or the Ctrl+Shift+C shortcut combination. - It then opens up the Chrome DevTools panel either on the bottom or on the right side of the web page, depending on your settings. I prefer setting it at the bottom, but it’s really a personal choice.
- Select “Lighthouse” from the panel’s toolbar.
(If you can’t find it, click the double arrows >> at the end of the toolbar). - Keep the mode at Navigation. Select Desktop as your Device.
(Lighthouse’s Mobile simulation uses a slower speed model, whereas Desktop audits give a great clean baseline for technical SEO) - Under Categories, select “Performance“, “Accessibility“, “Best Practice“, and “SEO“, and then click “Analyze page load.”
(If you are only analyzing a regular website, not a web application, there’s no need to select “Progressive Web App”.) - After a moment, Lighthouse will generate a report for you in a new tab.
Lighthouse will generate a beautiful scorecard graded from 0 to 100:
90 – 100 (Green): Your page is well-optimized.
Below 90 (Orange / Red): There is more work to do
Please keep in mind that this analysis you just ran was the results only for this page you opened, not for the entire website. Each page on your website would have different results, especially for Best Practices, Accessibility, and SEO. They all depend on various factors on each page.
To run the analysis for another web page, you can either open a new tab and repeat the steps we just did. Or, you can stay on this tab, navigate to a different page, click the report drop-down at the top left corner of the Lighthouse panel, and select “new report”, then click “Analyze page load”.
Understanding Your Report
Lighthouse Auditing Categories Explained:
What Does Each Category Mean?
- Performance: Measures how fast your page loads. In 2026, passing Google’s Core Web Vitals means hitting a Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) of under 2.0 seconds and an Interaction to Next Paint (INP) of under 200 milliseconds.
- Accessibility: Analyzes how friendly your page is for visitors who use assistive technologies like screen readers. It checks for crucial elements like image alt-text, heading hierarchies, and font contrast.
- Best Practices: Reviews if your page adheres to modern development standards, such as secure SSL certificates, up-to-date scripts, and optimized next-gen image formats.
- SEO: Evaluates if your web page meets basic search engine requirements, including meta descriptions, structured URLs, and mobile responsiveness.
Google PageSpeed Insights (An Alternative Tool)
Don’t want to mess with Chrome DevTools?
You can use PageSpeed Insights as a web-based alternative.
Open the tool. Enter your page URL, and click “Analyze.” This tool will generate reports for all categories, except Progressive Web App.
Scale Up to a Full-Site Audit
In 2026, website audits have gone beyond single-page testing. Google now utilizes site-wide scoring – meaning a few slow pages or technical errors on your blog can drag down the organic rankings of your entire domain.
Because Lighthouse only tests one page at a time, you need a domain-wide view to catch sitewide errors. To help you get the complete picture, we’ve updated this guide to include a powerful stack of 100% free technical audit tools you can use today.
- Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT)
- Why you need it: This is an absolute game-changer. For verified site owners, AWT crawls your entire website for free, scanning for over 170+ common technical issues (like broken links, redirect chains, or missing header tags) and monitoring your backlink profile.
- Google Search Console (GSC)
- Why you need it: This is your direct line to Google . GSC shows you exactly which of your pages are successfully indexed, alerts you to indexing errors, and tracks your actual keyword impressions and clicks in Google Search.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider (Free Version)
- Why you need it: A powerful desktop crawler. The free tier lets you crawl up to 500 pages per scan, making it incredibly easy to find broken links (404 errors), locate duplicate content, and verify your schema structured data.
Next Steps
Auditing your website is just the beginning for improving your website. Implementing the suggested improvements will significantly boost your site’s performance and SEO ranking.
Ready to dive deeper and start optimizing your website? Watch our detailed video walk-through on YouTube and follow along with the steps outlined in this blog. Your journey to a high-performing website begins with understanding and action.
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