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Improving Website Speed & Performance using Google Lighthouse

Google Lighthouse Chrome Logo

Web Development team member, Siphamandla, recently used Google Lighthouse to improve the website speed and performance for one of our clients. And the results were impressive, indeed!

We’ve all faced an annoyingly long queue. If you’re in a rush, you’ll be forced to leave that 11th item behind so you can join the snaking 10-items-only queue. If you’re not in a rush – although equally irritated – you’ll be subjected to a fellow queuer’s entire phone conversation, the shop manager’s questionable music taste, and those irresistible, well-placed chocolate bars.

The internet isn’t supposed to be like that. But sometimes it is. The difference? When you’re on a slow website you can click to skip the queue and jump to another business where you can find what you need faster. So, website speed and performance are very important because it can drastically improve or destroy the user experience. If neglected, it can have a negative impact on where your website sits in the search results. People don’t like to be kept waiting, so they will quickly ditch your website for another, and Google will prioritize the competition for web traffic that should be yours, so getting good designers and employees to help you with this is essential and you can handle all the people you hire with businesses like paystub online.

So how do you make sure your website isn’t ditched?

Get our Web Dev Team to audit your website using Google Lighthouse Chrome. This open-source, automated tool allows web developers to run a website speed test, troubleshoot a low performance score, and test a series of other key indicator tests that will improve the quality of web pages.

Website speed and performance case study

Rhino River Lodge

Siphamandla recently used Google Lighthouse to do exactly this for our long-time client, Rhino River Lodge. And just look at the results…

Before he conducted the website audit, the average page load speed was 30 to 40 percent, with the home and blog pages topping the worst performer list.

After running the audit and fixing the identified issues, the page load speed average doubled to between 70 and 80 percent. And those two worst performers? The home page jumped to 89% and the new blog page (currently not live) reached 91%.

Home page:

Improved website speed and performance Home page results using Google Lighthouse Chrome

 

New blog page:

Improved website speed and performance Blog page results using Google Lighthouse Chrome

New blog page example post:

Improved results Blog page using Google Lighthouse Chrome

Despite Spha spending days trying to optimize the old blog (currently live), it was not possible to push it above 40%. This is because the Theme and Plugins used to power the WordPress blog site are built to give us as many options which are unused, resulting in thousands of lines of code that get executed but not used.

It is impossible to reach 100% as there will always be parts of your website that have to stay the same if your website is going to work. But these are the main parts of the Rhino River Lodge website that Spha was able to optimize:

Third party code

If the JavaScript code written is importing too much functionality for third party code libraries and APIs, your website will load slowly. Third party code is what the developer employs to speed up the website building process, which in this case was Google fonts, Google Analytics code (tracking user response), MapBox, jQuery (includes slider, galleries, and navigation interaction), Facebook Pixel, and Send in Blue. Spha resolved the page speed by preloading fonts, moving JS scripts to the footer so that they are the last to load, compressed HTML, CSS and JS code, and wrote new code where necessary to further optimize.

Accommodation page:

Improved website speed and performance Accommodation page results using Google Lighthouse Chrome

Images

A website that has zero content would load at the fastest speed possible. But websites need content, particularly beautiful images for visual appeal, so Spha optimized as much as possible. He did so by compressing them all, serving them to WebP format, and creating image variants for different screens.

Gallery page:

Improved results Gallery page using Google Lighthouse Chrome

Benefits of Google Lighthouse

When compared to other website auditing tools, like GTmetrix, Pingdom and PageSpeed, Google Lighthouse comes out tops for the Web Dev team because it:

  • Gives very clear information about the issue and suggests solutions relative to the CMS platform being optimized.
  • Can be used alongside Google DevTools, which our team employ to build or debug code.
  • Conducts deep analysis of how to improve user accessibility and experience relating to:
      • Meta data, alt tags, and HTML attributes like ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications); and
      • HTML5 tags that enhance accessibility for disabled people.

Best practice advice by Spha

“It can be difficult and sometimes unrealistic to fix the performance of a website that was built without performance in mind. In the initial stage, when deciding what tools to use at the beginning of the web development process, be weary of tools that will not give flexibility for future website changes and growth. By keeping Google Lighthouse in the back of your mind during the website build, you can make sure the code is lean, and use libraries sparingly and without security issues.”

By using Google Lighthouse for website speed and performance troubleshooting, your investment into web design, development and digital marketing for your business pays off. If you’re worried that visitors are ditching your website for a faster one, contact us about our website speed and performance audits.

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