Marketing Monday: How To Fix Your Website Based On A Google Lighthouse Audit

Originally Published November 2019

Today we’re explaining more specifics on how to fix a few things on your website based on a Google Lighthouse Audit within the Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO tabs. Let’s learn how to fix a Google Lighthouse audit together in this blog. Also, be sure to check out our YouTube video on the subject if you prefer to watch rather than read.

Title card reading: How to fix items from your Google LIghthouse Audit. With lighthouse graphic on grey background.

Lighthouse Audit: Performance

The performance section will require more backend work from a website developer. If you are not comfortable or knowledgeable in this area, I would recommend outsourcing this type of work to a company like Cohlab.

Lighthouse Audit: Accessibility

The next part, Accessibility, is where we can do things you can handle.

First up is contrast, making sure your background and foreground colors are different enough. You can go in and change text colors, font colors. You can change your background or theme color, even go into the HTML and adjust the background tone.

For best practices we have [id] attributes on the page that isn’t unique. Each image and button is going to have its own [id] so you want to make sure each one is unique so Google and users know what’s happening.

Names and Labels, you want to make sure Iframe elements have their own unique titles. And then form elements, so if you have a contact form, which has first name, last name, etc.,  each needs its own label. So the label should physically appear inside the form box or above it, so go in and make sure those are input in your form maker.

Also make sure any link also has a name, not just “click here” or a logo.

Lighthouse Audit: Best Practices

Under Best Practices, we have links to cross-origin destinations that are unsafe, so any link that’s going out of your website should have a rel=noopener tag on it that way it opens in a separate window and the processes aren’t affected.

JavaScript libraries are something you have to update fairly often. It might not be something you want to handle on your own as it can break things unexpectedly. But usually, on WordPress or other CMSs, they have a way of updating those inside them.

The aspect-ratio on your images this is something that people are looking at your images in different devices or browser, they need to be able to adjust those images within your website.

Lighthouse Audit: SEO

Lastly, under SEO, we’ve passed all the audits, but you want to make sure that WordPress, Weebly or whatever has an SEO spot to put in Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions. They might have a plugin like Yoast on WordPress but make sure that every page and blog has a title and description properly set up.

Make sure the page is not blocked from indexing. Get your website domain in Google Search Console and then you can see what pages if they are blocked from Google crawling them, and why. Then you can go in and fix them.

It’ll also check under SEO here if there are any unwanted plugins that Google has flagged.

That’s all for today, thanks for watching. Please like and share our video with your friends if you learned something.

If you didn’t learn anything, ask us a follow-up question below, and we’ll answer as soon as we can. Also, be sure to like and subscribe to get the latest Marketing Monday every week.