HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE SPEED USING LIGHTHOUSE (BEGINNER STEPS)

Table of Contents
• Intro To Google Lighthouse
• How To Check Your Website Speed in Minutes
• Tips To Improve Your Website Speed

In this guide today, you will be learning how to improve your website speed by using lighthouse SEO, as someone who have taken out some time or days to build website for themselves or business and later have to discover that the website speed is very slow, and one of the disadvantage of a slowing loading website is that you will lost visitors, that is like when visitors land on your website and have to wait for some time and the website is not loading that fast, they will have to leave your website to other website that loads faster and still have what they are looking for, but with this guide now your website will start to load faster if you follow everything that will be mentioned here.

INTRO TO GOOGLE LIGHTHOUSE

Some of you must have used google lighthouse, but for the sake of my new people that are just coming online, I will be explaining and teaching what google light house is and how it will help you. Google Lighthouse is a free tool that helps you to check and get analytics on how heathy and fast that your website is. What it does is to analyze your website and gives you some score for things like speed, SEO, accessibility and best practices of your website. But what makes it best for you as a beginner is that you don’t need any technical skill to use it, and also with just a little click, Lighthouse will show you what is slowing down your website with clear suggestions that you can follow to make your site load faster and work better for visitors who come to your website. We will now be moving to how you can check your website speed in minutes.

HOW TO CHECK YOUR WEBSITE SPEED IN MINUTES

Checking your website speed with lighthouse is very simple, but before we start just know that when I talk about website speed, it simply means how fast that your website load when someone searches it on their browser. To check the website speed on lighthouse, all you have to do is to; (1) Have your chrome browser and then install lighthouse extension, once you are done installing the Lighthouse extension. (2) open your website that you want to test the speed. (3) Once your website is open, then look at the top-right corner of your website and you will see the lighthouse icon near your extension. Then go ahead and click on the icon. (4) Choose what you want to test, once you have click on the icon you will see some categories like SEO, Performance, Best practices, so you can just go ahead and choose everything. (5) Run the report, once you are done selecting all the categories then you can now go ahead to click on the generate report button. Lighthouse will then analyze the page and show your speed score with other suggestions. So, this is how you can use lighthouse to check your website speed, if you are lost or still confused on how to go about this then you can watch this lighthouse video tutorial so that you can understand it better. Now we are moving on the tips that you can follow to improve your website speed.

TIPS TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE SPEED

To improve your website speed so that it can load very fast, there are some tips that you will need to follow so as to achieve that goal. These are some of the tips that you need to follow; (1) Use a Fast Hosting Provider, there are many hosting providers out there like Namecheap, Hostinger, Bluehost and others. When trying to host your website and you need your website to load very fast, don’t go for those very cheap hosting providers because cheap hosting is usually slow. Go for like popular ones like Namecheap or Hostinger because has a big impact on the speed. (2) Compress Images, normally large image is one of the biggest reasons that sites load slowly. When you want to add image to your website then I will suggest that you always compress your images to small sizes by using tools like image compressor but I always use Squoosh for myself when working on project and it is really the best for me, so you can also give it a try too. (3) Proper Image Format, when using image on your website, I will also want you to use proper image format. And the modern formats are like WebP because it takes less storage and also it loads faster than PNG or JPG. (4) Remove Unimportant Plugins, using too many plugins makes your website speed to slow down, especially if you are using WordPress. When using plugins on your website, just use the ones important to you and then delete anything that you don’t use on your website. (5) Lazy Load Images, on website there is what is known as lazy loading and what it does is that it makes the things on your website to load slowly as the user scroll and this helps to increase the speed because the browser now will not try to load every it at once. So now if you add lazy loading to your images, it will make the images to load only when the users scroll to the images, this now makes the initial page to load faster. (6) Minify CSS and JavaScript, if you are building your website by coding it with CSS and JavaScript, then you will have to minify your code. And minify your code simply means removing all the things that is not necessary in your code and extra spaces, which now makes your code smaller and load faster. So that is what minifying your code means, and also, they are some tools online that can help you to minify your CSS and JavaScript code by copy your code and pasting it on the minifying tools and it will do the work for you, so you have the choice to either do it yourself manually or use some minifying tools online.

These is how you can make your website loads very fast by following all the tips and guide that I just mentioned in this blog, and also you can always visit our blog & website to learn more from us. You can also be of help to others by sharing this guide and tips.