

Google Lighthouse – A Free Website Healthcheck
Google Lighthouse is available to everyone. It is the simplest means of reviewing the technical health of your website. As a Google product, it is reasonable to assume that these health metrics will be the same as those used to help rank your website on Google. Lighthouse is a great starting point for technical SEO.
The web changes all the time – your stats will slip. Reviewing your website with Google Lighthouse is something you, as a website owner, should do regularly.
Accessing Google Lighthouse
The three simplest methods for accessing Google Lighthouse are:
- The third party website: web.dev
- A Google Extension
- Chrome Dev tools
Web Dev
If you’re not using Google Chrome, this will be the simplest solution. Simply navigate to https://pagespeed.web.dev/ and enter your domain and hit the blue ‘Analyze’ button.

Using the Chrome Extension
If you’re using Google’s Chrome browser, head to https://chromewebstore.google.com/category/extensions and search for ‘lighthouse’. It’s the first extension you hit …

Follow the instructions to complete the installation.
Once installed, you can produce a report any time from the extensions menu – top right of your Chrome screen.

Google Lighthouse via Chrome’s Dev Tools
Chrome has an extensive and detailed set of tools to help you analyse exactly how your site is working. It can be pretty daunting to the inexperienced user but, again, these are powerful tools and they are available to anyone.
To access the Dev Tools, right-click (or CTRL-click if you’re not using a two-button mouse) almost anywhere on the web page. A menu should spring up. The last item on it should be ’Inspect‘ … select this and the Dev Tools window will open.

Some sites disable the display of a menu on right-click. If yours is one of those, we suggest using one of the above methods.
Once open, the dev tools are BIG. Look for the word Lighthouse somewhere top-right. And you should see a screen something like the below. Click the ‘Analyze page load’ button to generate the report.

Before You Run The Report
Before running the report, you can choose whether to run the report for mobile or desktop devices. The mobile report is a lot harsher – getting truly excellent mobile performance can involve some difficult compromises and significant expense.
Google services interfere with each other. If you’re running the report from within Chrome (either dev tools or the extension) you should load the page you wish to inspect from an ‘Incognito Window’.

You can open an Incognito Window from the file menu.
I’ve Got My Google Lighthouse Report, Now What?
A Google Lighthouse will look something like this:

Understanding your Report
The report is broken into five key aspects:
- Performance – put simply, site-speed. Site speed matters but it is technical. There are many steps which can be taken to improve site performance but none are guaranteed and almost all are developer-level actions.
- Accessibility – more important for some sites than others. Publicly-funded sites will need to demonstrate excellent accessibility, others less so. Nonetheless, accessibility is a ranking factor; if you care about SEO, you cannot ignore the accessibility metric.
- Best Practices – how well does the site compare with current web development standards? It can be tricky to keep this metric high – if you’re using techniques and plugins that use older technologies, you cannot necessarily escape being penalised.
- SEO – this measure will only tell you of any glaring errors in your site set-up. It cannot comment on the quality of your content. Nonetheless, if anything comes up here, it needs to be resolved. Pronto.
- PWA – as of May 2024, Progressive Web Applications have been deprecated from the report and will be removed entirely.
Each section of the report is colour-coded: 90–100% is excellent, 50–89% fair to good, and <50% needs improvement. Achieving excellence across the board is very difficult but all sites should achieve at least 50% in all sections.
In Conclusion
It is worth remembering that each report is a ‘snapshot’, Google Lighthouse results do vary slightly day-to-day.
Unfortunately, fixing most of the issues in a Google Lighthouse report will fall to your developer. The internet changes all the time; every website is unique. It is quite possible that even a diligent developer might have missed something new that affects your site.
This may discourage you from running a report in the first place but, it is wise to have up-to-date knowledge of how your website is performing. It is, after all, your business’ shop front online, you have invested in it and it makes sense to look after that investment.
Your development team will want your site to perform well, you might be surprised how far they will go to fix things.