Today's marketing tip is going to be about Google Lighthouse. If you've not heard of Google Lighthouse, this is a great tool for improving your MSP website, SEO, performance, traffic, and overall business success!
Let’s start with the basics:
What is Google Lighthouse?
Google Lighthouse is a key tool that all MSP marketing agencies should be using. It is a product of Google, and its purpose is to assess and gauge your current website, specifically noting areas where you can improve to boost marketing, traffic, sales, and revenue. Essentially, it’s a way to ensure that your website is operating at its best.
How can Google Lighthouse improve your MSP website?
The goal of Google Lighthouse is to locate problem areas in your website and correct them.
“Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. You can run it against any web page, public or requiring authentication. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, and more.”
How do you use Google Lighthouse?
When you use Google Lighthouse, you’ll be performing what Google calls “an audit” on a website. To perform an audit:
1. Start by ensuring that you’re in a Google Chrome browser. This feature only works in Chrome.
2. Navigate to the webpage you’d like to audit.
3. Click on the three vertical dots in the upper right-hand corner of your Google browser.
4. A drop-down menu will appear. Navigate to “more tools” within the drop-down menu.
5. From the “more tools” selection, another drop-down menu will appear. Within this menu, navigate to “developer tools.” Click on this.
6. This will open a new within-browser window (usually on the right-hand side of your screen) that says “Audits” at the top.
Here, you’ll be making selections about the parameters of the audit you’re about to perform.
- Start by selecting whether you’d like the audit performed based on Mobile or Desktop criteria.
- Next, choose the exact audits you’d like to run. You can choose from any of the following (or all five):
- Performance
- Progressive Web App
- Best practices
- Accessibility
- SEO
- You can also choose “Simulated Fast 3G,” “Applied Fast 3G,” or “No throttling”
7. Once you’ve chosen the parameters for your audit, click “Run audits” (a blue button near the bottom of the menu).
8. Wait for the audit to conclude, then assess your results, which will appear in the same window.
How do you read your Google Lighthouse audit results?
At the top of the Google Lighthouse window, you’ll see several scores listed out of 100. Scores will depend on the parameters you chose when deciding what type of audits you intended to run. For example, if you wanted to audit “Performance” and “Accessibility,” you’ll see scores for each of these audits here.
Scores of 90 to 100 are in green (good). Scores of 50 to 89 are in yellow (fair), and scores of 49 and below are in red (poor). Ideally, you want green in all category results of your audit.
The core goal of Google Lighthouse is to assess exactly what’s wrong with your website because before you can improve your site, you need to know the areas in which you need to improve, right?
While the information provided by Google Lighthouse should certainly be accurate, we do recommend re-checking the audits of your MSP website with other, similar applications. For example, let’s say you ran a Google Lighthouse audit and your “Performance” score was poor. You should certainly work with your website developer to improve this. For example, the reason for the low score could be any of the following:
- Hosting
- Plug-ins that are loading
- Third-party scripts that are executing
You’ll want to get this score up, but you’ll also want to cross-check your site with other auditing applications to make sure the original score was accurate. For the “Performance” example, you might try running your MSP website through Pingdom.
How does your MSP website measure up in Google Lighthouse?
Google Lighthouse is an extremely useful tool in a world where Google reigns. Of course, once you run Google Lighthouse, your results will dictate that you’ll need to take action, and this is where you should be working with a website developer and marketing team.
Optimizing your MSP website according to Google Lighthouse standards may seem like a minor improvement, but it can have huge results for your business. We’ve seen it happen many times! Businesses often completely turn around their profits once they finally turn their attention to improving their website.
You can do the same! Start by grading your MSP website now with Ulistic.
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