Optimizing your website’s performance is key to staying ahead of the curve. Meet the Lighthouse Scoring Calculator – a useful tool that may change the game for developers, SEO specialists, and anyone aiming to enhance their online presence. In this article, we’ll dive into what the Lighthouse Scoring Calculator is, why it’s a must-have in your toolkit, who should be wielding it, and how to make the most of its capabilities.
What is the Lighthouse Scoring Calculator?
The Lighthouse Scoring Calculator is an amazing tool that helps you get a better understanding of the Performance Score of your website. This real-time calculator provides a Performance Score (the gauge on the right) based on the Value and Metric Score you manually enter. Say you ran a report in PageSpeed Insights a few days ago, you got the results for each metric – these were not that bad – but it is not totally clear what these mean. By entering these values in the calculator, you’ll be able to get a better view of the score by knowing the reason why.
How is the Performance Score determined?
Each Metric has a specific Weighting that affects the Performance Score. By August 2024 (v12 of the Lighthouse Scoring Calculator), the weight for each metric is as follows:
- First Contentful Paint – 10%
- Speed Index – 10%
- Largest Contentful Paint – 25%
- Total Blocking Time – 30%
- Cumulative Layout Shift – 25%
This means that whichever score you get on Total Blocking Time (TBT), this value will have the most effect on the final Performance Score of your website. Therefore, if you want to know more on how the Performance score is weighted, follow this link.
Why should we use the Lighthouse Scoring Calculator?
Its intuitive and simple commands make it the perfect tool to clearly plan possible strategies and specific areas to improve on your website to obtain better performance. Moreover, knowing how far you can go on letting FCP ‘go bad’ or making sure TBT doesn’t go beyond a very specific value makes this calculator a perfect tool for planning and monitoring your performance.
Who should use the Lighthouse Scoring Calculator?
The beauty of the Lighthouse Scoring Calculator lies in its simplicity. Whether you’re a seasoned developer, a digital marketer, or a business owner with a website, this tool is for you. The calculator doesn’t provide much detail, as PageSpeed Insights would, in terms of diagnostics but as we said before, makes it a perfect tool for planning and creating strategies.
How should you use the Lighthouse Scoring Calculator?
Using the Lighthouse Scoring Calculator is a straightforward process.
To be honest, using the calculator doesn’t take much more than that: ‘click ’n’ drag’ the range sliders and you are ready to go! As you adjust the values, the Performance Score will update automatically. Similarly, the same goes for the icons of each metric (FCP, LCP, CLS, etc). Additionally, as you adjust the sliders for Value or the Metric Score of each metric, their icons will change depending on the value output or score output, displaying if that value represents a GOOD, NEEDS IMPROVEMENT or POOR score.
Evidently, to get the best use out of the Lighthouse Scoring Calculator, there must be an objective in mind. How much improvement do we need to do to get TBT to a good score? Using this tool will help you answer these questions and let you plan accordingly.
Conclusion
Despite its simplicity, this tool gives a lot of information. Knowing how to read and understand its values will allow us to plan ahead strategies to modify our website, know which areas we have to improve and what we need to achieve our objective: keeping a good performance – which may increase the organic traffic and improve user experience; identifying weaknesses holding your site back – a poor metric keeping you from getting a good score overall; maintaining a “good as possible” score without sacrificing other areas of the business – campaigns that require new additions to the website which may hurt its performance.
