Discovered that the Chrome web browser has a built in website analysis tool, called Lighthouse. Bloody amazing tool given it's completely free and does far more than most SEO firms can do for an actual fee. Been using it to optimise our cycling club's website.
Anyway, just ran it against STW's front page out of curiosity (no blockers, not logged in).
Quite interesting analysis - 12 Mbytes of Ads come with the front page and there I was worried about our club site serving a few 100 kBs of JS libraries and wondering if I should prune them down...
[url= https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53322359974_26c0050497.jp g" target="_blank">https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53322359974_26c0050497.jp g"/> [/img][/url][url= https://flic.kr/p/2peV2U3 ]STW LH1[/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/brf/ ]Ben Freeman[/url], on Flickr
[url= https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53322240978_5d46b29b97.jp g" target="_blank">https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53322240978_5d46b29b97.jp g"/> [/img][/url][url= https://flic.kr/p/2peUqwo ]STW LH2[/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/brf/ ]Ben Freeman[/url], on Flickr
NB If you want to play, hit F12 in Chrome, scroll along the development menu bar till you see Lighthouse and just ask it to analyse the page you have open...
Maybe that Scottish MP has an excuse after all...
I haven't got an F12 key
I haven’t got an F12 key
I would borrow one from somewhere because the ad issue and page loading times here are a major problem.
Oh dear Google, oh dear.
Oh dear Google, oh dear.
Yes, our club site can't score 100% as we embed Google Maps in it and Lighthouse doesn't rate Google Maps very highly!
Amazing tool though, learned loads just reading all it's suggestions on things to improve.
You need to make sure you test in a clean browser. ie. incognito mode or it will taint the results.
Oh dear Google, oh dear.
Yes, our club site can’t score 100% as we embed Google Maps in it and Lighthouse doesn’t rate Google Maps very highly!
Not unusual to have a page that passes with flying colours... except for external javascript loaded by Google, YouTube embeds and for Google Analytics... which is ironic when you're aiming for a clean bill of health from Lighthouse to keep Google happy.
Our home page scores for desktop and mobile.
[url= https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53323078595_e3fc3467e8.jp g" target="_blank">https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53323078595_e3fc3467e8.jp g"/> [/img][/url][url= https://flic.kr/p/2peYHw4 ]ELSR Lighthouse[/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/brf/ ]Ben Freeman[/url], on Flickr
I need to serve smaller images to mobile users to get the mobile score up.
Need to knock up a script to auto generate a set of sizes from every image and then auto populate the html with the set.
rootsandrain.com homepage. Desktop:
Mobile:
I'll take that 😁
I need to serve smaller images to mobile users to get the mobile score up.
It always says that if you are making use of modern high dpi phone screens. Mobile users have better screens, and can more easily zoom in (and do). Lighthouse/google seems to ignore this. Check out webp if you haven’t already.
I haven’t got an F12 key<br />I would borrow one from somewhere because the ad issue and page loading times here are a major problem.<br /><br />
Where do I plug an F12 key into my iPad? Do they come with a Lightning connector? My phone has a USB-C port if that helps…
Maybe that Scottish MP has an excuse after all…<br /><br />
should we try and guess his forum handle?
my moneys on perchypanther
Mobile users have better screens, and can more easily zoom in (and do).
I was thinking for banner background images etc, I should really get the screen resolution and then just serve an appropriate sized image. There's only certain images where they might want to zoom in and look at detail eg images of club kit, for which I can serve a small image and they can then click through to get a massive one. That will speed up loading of the initial page.
Check out webp if you haven’t already.
Yep, Lighthouse mentioned this in their report. I mainly serve jpgs and pngs. I will knock up a Python script to generate a set of sizes in webp for all images and then get jinja to use whatever is the closest match to their screen size.
