Go Us! 100% Performance in Google Lighthouse

Google Lighthouse is a powerful and widely used tool for assessing the performance and quality of websites. Achieving a 100% performance rating in Google Lighthouse is a goal that many website owners aspire to reach.

In this quick article, we’ll explore the key strategies and optimisations that helped us get that coveted 100% score.

Caveat: Lighthouse scores do vary from test to test … by the time you read this our ranking may well have slipped. But even so, this is a hard trick to pull off so we feel we need a little boast.

Images often contribute significantly to a website‘s page size and loading times. To improve your performance rating, make sure your images are optimised for the web. We used WebP wherever possible at responsive sizes. We used lazy loading to load images only when they enter the viewport.

We then used a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to optimise the delivery of images to the website. CDNs distribute the website’s assets across multiple servers worldwide, ensuring users access content from the nearest server, reducing latency and speeding up load times. Our CDN sends our images while our server is busy building the web page, meaning the whole site runs faster.

Reducing the number of CSS and JavaScript files as well as their file sizes can have a substantial impact on your website’s performance. Minimising unnecessary code and combining multiple files into bundles reduces HTTP requests.

Normally we would do both of these, but this time it caused clashes and errors. So, instead, we moved all our static scripts and stylesheets to the Cloudflare cache … bingo!

Moving the cache to Cloudflare means your files get served faster and your web server has to do less work. Cloudflare also gives you in-depth control of your browser caching. Browser caching allows you to store frequently accessed resources on a user’s device, reducing the need to re-download them on subsequent visits.

Our provider offers fast and reliable server performance. Your hosting infrastructure plays a pivotal role in your website’s speed, so choose a provider with a reputation for speed and reliability. We use KDAws, in Sheffield. Thanks lads!

The guys at KDAws installed an additional level of server cacheing – Redis Cache – again it reduces the amount of work our web server has to do. Leaving it with more resources to get you our website faster.

It’s a pretty standard website. Just WordPress. But the speed came from what we left out, not what we put in.

Plugins and third-party scripts, such as analytics tools, social media widgets, and advertising scripts, can significantly impact your website’s performance. We assessed the necessity of these scripts and removed any that are not crucial for the site’s functionality.

We have a carefully chosen set of plugins which we know deliver good looks and consistent performance. If it ain’t on our list, it’s not going in.

We still feel there’s work to be done here. But, with the best DNS (Cloudflare) and our amazing hosts and some sweeeet web development skills, we’ve gone a long way.

Our web server responds quickly to incoming requests but we’re still looking for improvements.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No. It’s the Little Fire Digital Website.

Receiving a perfect 100% performance rating in Google Lighthouse is a challenging but achievable goal – we know, because we achieved it!

By focusing on image optimisation, script management, effective caching and other some development techniques which we incorporated from the ground up – we achieved it.

Remember that web performance is an ongoing process, and continuous monitoring and improvement are key to maintaining that perfect score. These efforts will not only result in a better user experience but also improve our website’s search engine ranking and overall success.