Progressive web apps are growing every day with advanced features. Sometimes, developers struggle with optimizing their websites. Google Lighthouse is an innovative tool for accelerating the performance of progressive applications. It helps you to enhance the speed, security, and efficiency of a PWA.
This blog will explain what Google Lighthouse is and how it can perform a thorough check on the PWA application.So, let’s dive straight.
Table of Contents
What is Google Lighthouse?
Google Lighthouse is an open-source auditing tool launched by Google in early 2018. It helps developers to improve the quality and accessibility of web pages. Also, it works as an automated tool designed to audit websites. Moreover, It is also best known for auditing progressive web applications. In the end, this review tool provides an audit report with a set of improvising suggestions.
Google Lighthouse uses five categories to audit a website:
- Performance: It will show how much time takes to load, how it displays the content to the user, etc. This performance score shows how decently the website performs, where the 98th percentile is 100, the 75th percentile is 50, and so on.
- Accessibility: It reflects how accessible your website uses accessibility features, such as audio captions, button names, etc. The accessibility score shows whether all the elements of web pages are screen-reader friendly.
- SEO: SEO performance score tells if your website is SEO-friendly. It evaluates web pages based on parameters, including meta description, presence of title element, legible font sizes, links, and presence of unsuccessful code like 400, 404, 500, etc.
- Progressive Web App: Web applications are built using PWA technology. Because of a service worker, manifest, and other components, it is a suitable framework to make the application behave similarly to native apps.
However, performance Score points depend on the PWA features introduced by Google, such as Service Worker implementation(s), viewport handling, offline functionality, etc.
- Best Practices: Developers can apply certain practices to improve their scores. This Best practice score shows the main points, including :
- Use of HTTPS
- Avoid using deprecated code, such as tags, directives, libraries, etc.
- Password input with paste-into disabled
- Cookies and Geo-location alerts
Color Codes to Use for Metrics
Lighthouse reviews each category separately. It gave them a score between 0 (lowest score) and 100 (the best score). The color code to measure the performance:
- Red for 0 to 49
- Orange for 50 to 89
- Green for 90 to 100
If websites have a low-performance score, don’t be disappointed. It allows for improving your optimization skills. You must take the advice provided by this Google tool. So, take them seriously to help web apps to achieve a standard performance level. Also, you can create a set of best practices to optimize both old and new projects.
4 Ways to use Google Lighthouse for Web App
The Lighthouse can be used to calculate the score of any progressive web app. It has four genuine applications:
- In Chrome DevTools
- Use the Lighthouse NPM package and CLI
- As a Node module
- As a Chrome Extension
How does Google Lighthouse work for PWA apps?
🔥Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) is a hybrid version of mobile apps and web pages. Users can access the web application directly from the web browser. It offers a similar experience to native apps. You don’t need to install PWA apps to use them. In addition, the PWA version of native apps can save your phone storage space, as there is no need to download them.
Key Features:
- Integrate the Add to Home Screen button on the browser.
- Apply push notifications to re-engage users.
- Access the PWA web app in any network condition.
- Get mobile-like full-screen loading.
- It offers the best browsing experience.
- Ensure secure communication between the website and the user.
- Encrypted connections will not affect the content.
🔥PWA is one of Lighthouse’s five performance categories. It offers valuable insights and feedback to developers. Also, PWA web app performance depends on the following major factors:
- Speed
- Security
- Responsive design
- Offline performance
- Indexing
- Push notifications
- Caching
- User experience
Lighthouse does some tests on your PWA to suggest solutions to fix issues. It will test the remaining portion of PWA. Therefore, this Google audit tool will save developers time while developing the web app. With detailed reports, developers can find the actual issues of working PWA and work on them. Besides, updates can aid in increasing PWA speed, traffic, and user engagement. It can help take a different approach to create exceptional PWAs.
In Conclusion
Thus, optimizing PWA with the Lighthouse tool contributes to increased traffic, revenue, and visibility on search engines. The lighthouse PWA audit tool does not require any coding. As a result, all you need to do is to buy a domain name and set it up on the web servers. Our experts will help you set up a progressive application if you need it.
