PageSpeed Insights scores rise after Lighthouse update

Google has released a brand new version of Lighthouse, meaning PageSpeed Insights scores will be improved for 90% pages as a result.

What is Lighthouse?

Lighthouse is an open-source tool built by Google to help you improve the quality of your web pages in terms of page speed. You can run lighthouse reports within the Google Chrome browser within Chrome DevTools, as well as just using the PageSpeed Insights tool from Google.

Lighthouse 10, which is the latest version of Lighthouse released just last week, has removed a metric used to test the page speed of your website – the Time to Interactive (TTI) metric. This measured how long it takes for the website to load before a visitor can click a button or use the website’s navigation.

Why has Google removed TTI?

Google announced that it has removed TTI due to other metrics – such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which is part of Google’s Core Web Vitals used to determine search rankings – are better measurements of how a webpage feels when it is loading.

Of course, in the past few years, Google has stressed the importance of user experience. Core Web Vitals started being used as a ranking factor in June 2021, so Google has updated Lighthouse to make sure that the company is able to get as much information as possible to understand user experience.

Another reason for Google removing TTI from Lighthouse is that it wants to encourage publishers and SEOs to focus on reducing heavy JavaScript on websites, which has a large effect on page speed and user experience.

Page speed is a really important factor and one you should look into to help improve user experience, as well as your website’s performance in Google search results. Find out how you can improve your website’s page speed by joining EngageWeb.Club, where we explore this and a whole lot more topics.

• About
• Latest Posts

Jonathon Roberts

Jonathon lives and breathes marketing, boasting a degree in Business Management and Marketing Management and a diverse list of experiences both professional and voluntary. Having grown up in the thick of the digital and social media age, he has been quick to dive into online marketing and search engine optimisation in his career and spare time, spanning such fields as academics, local business and sport.

Latest posts by Jonathon Roberts (see all)

• Key takeaways from Google’s latest search reviews update - November 10, 2023
• Mobile-first indexing: what is it, and why has it taken so long? - November 3, 2023
• Google updates structured data understanding - October 31, 2023