Having a good Google Lighthouse score is crucial for the success of your website – not only to improve user experience but also to positively impact your SEO. Achieving a high score can feel daunting, but as we’ve shown, it’s achievable with some time and effort. In summary, keep the number of third-party libraries and fonts to a minimum, ensure your website is accessible, follow best practices, optimise your images, and test your website regularly using Lighthouse.
 
If you have a site built in Pixel Together, you have the advantage of automatic optimisation and constant updates to ensure your scores remain strong, saving you a huge amount of time, effort and expertise. So, if you’re looking to build a website that not only looks great but performs well, sign up for your 14-day free trial here.

We don’t want to give away all of the updates we made, as some of these are part of the automatic optimisation magic you get when you build your site in Pixel; however, here are some of the key updates we made, across the categories that might apply to your site.
 
Performance
Third-party libraries
A classic irony is that when you run Google Lighthouse, it often tells you the problem is all the Google libraries you have installed! The latest version of Lighthouse is super strict on mobile performance, so be ruthless about what third-party libraries are installed, and keep the number of fonts and analytics to a minimum. If you need to do specific user testing, install more analytics for a short period, then remove them.
As an example, we were using “AddThis” on our blog page to allow our articles to be easily shared. When we determined this negatively affected our score, we replaced them with links to our social media pages.
We also removed our help widget from the public site. Instead, the support library can be accessed via the “Support” link, with the help widget available once our customers have logged in to the site.
 
Fonts
We had several fonts on our home page, so we reduced this to just one (Proxima Nova).
 
Javascript
Behind the scenes for all the sites created in Pixel, we split the javascript into two parts, so only the essential javascript is loaded at the top of the page. This satisfies Google’s criteria to load only the minimum code needed to display the top section of a site, with the rest loading at the end. According to Google's recommendation, we tried rendering the styles as an inline stylesheet, but surprisingly that didn’t help our scores.
 
These are the types of cuts you currently need to make to get an excellent mobile performance score.
 
Accessibility
Across all our sites, we checked and fixed semantic issues with the auto-generated html code to ensure the code is accessible. For example, generating all buttons as html rather than links.
This is now updated for all our customers, as automatic across all Pixel sites!
 
We’d built our site according to our style guide, which meant our buttons were all orange. However, we take accessibility seriously, and the contrast of the orange wasn’t accessible. So, we changed all button colours to green or black.
 
Best Practices
We were already strong in best practices, but we made minor fixes suggested by Google for our generated code so that all Pixel sites automatically get the maximum Lighthouse score in this area.

SEO
We ensured all of our site's images had an alt description, even for decorative images.

The results and comparison with other website builders
After making these changes, our Lighthouse scores improved significantly, as shown below.

If you’re a website owner or builder, you’ve probably heard the noise around Google Lighthouse scores for several years. It’s the open-source tool that audits websites and measures and rates their performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. A website lighthouse score plays a critical role in visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs). So, it’s something we at Pixel HQ constantly pay a lot of attention to! We ensure our sites automatically perform well so our customers don’t have to.
 
Historically we’ve always gotten good Lighthouse scores; however, recently we noticed that our mobile performance score had dropped into the red. A little research showed that the same problem had occurred for all of the major website builders. Why? Google has tightened up the criteria required to get the same high scores we were previously recording. Getting a good Lighthouse score significantly impacts a site’s SEO, so it’s important to us to be well into the green across all criteria.

What factors impact a Lighthouse score?
Before we dive into what we did to vastly improve our score, it’s essential to understand that various factors influence Lighthouse scores. For instance, the size of your website, the hosting provider you choose and the content you add to your website will all impact your scores. Therefore, we first recommend you build your site in Pixel to check the hosting box and test your website regularly using Lighthouse to identify any issues.

How we improved our Lighthouse score?
When we began our Lighthouse auditing process, this was our mobile score. Not terrible, but definitely not where we want it to be.