Why a Technical Audit Matters

A technical audit helps you identify issues that can hurt user experience, search visibility, and conversion rates. Common focus areas include performance, accessibility, SEO, and best practices. Running a quick audit is the fastest way to spot problem areas and prioritize improvements.

One of the easiest tools to get started with is Chrome's built-in Lighthouse audit. It's free, fast, and provides actionable insights for developers, designers, and marketers alike.

What Is Lighthouse?

Lighthouse is a diagnostic tool built into Chrome DevTools. It runs automated tests against a page and reports scores and recommendations across these categories:

• Performance
• Accessibility
• Best Practices
• SEO

Because the web is mobile-first, Lighthouse also lets you test mobile performance specifically, which is critical for modern SEO and user experience.

Step-by-Step: Run a Lighthouse Audit

Follow these simple steps to run a mobile-first audit in Chrome:

1. Open the page you want to test in Google Chrome.
2. Right-click anywhere on the page and choose “Inspect” to open DevTools.
3. In the DevTools panel, select the “Lighthouse” tab.
4. Choose the device type — select “Mobile” for a mobile-first audit.
5. Select the categories you want to evaluate (Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, SEO).
6. Click “Generate report” (or “Analyze page load").

Lighthouse will load the page, run its checks, and present a report with scores and detailed recommendations.

Interpreting Lighthouse Results

• Scores: Each category receives a numeric score (0-100). Scores in the green (typically 90+) indicate strong performance, while yellow and red highlight areas needing attention.
• Diagnostics: Shows more detailed metrics related to the score, such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Total Blocking Time (TBT), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
• Opportunities: Specific suggestions that can improve performance and provide estimated time savings.
• Passed/Failed Audits: Clear indicators for accessibility, SEO, and best-practice checks.

For example, a Performance score of 96 means the page is well-optimized, but you should still review the Opportunities and Diagnostics to catch any incremental gains.

Quick Wins and Next Steps

After you run the audit, consider these next steps:

• Prioritize fixes by impact: Start with items that yield the biggest UX or SEO improvements.
• Address Core Web Vitals: Focus on LCP, TBT (or First Input Delay), and CLS, since they directly affect search ranking and user experience.
• Optimize assets: Compress images, serve responsive images, and enable modern formats like WebP where possible.
• Minimize render-blocking resources: Defer or async non-critical JavaScript and CSS.
• Improve accessibility: Fix missing alt attributes, color contrast issues, and ARIA labeling problems reported by Lighthouse.
• Re-run regularly: Run audits after major changes and periodically to catch regressions.

Best Practices for Testing

• Run multiple tests: Network conditions and page variability mean one run is not always representative. Run several tests and average results.
• Test representative pages: Audit your homepage, key landing pages, and any template-driven pages (product pages, article pages) rather than just the homepage.
• Use lab and field data: Combine Lighthouse lab data with real-user metrics (e.g., Chrome UX Report or analytics) to get the full picture.

Conclusion and Call to Action

Running a Lighthouse audit is a fast, effective way to surface technical issues affecting performance, accessibility, and SEO. It only takes a few minutes and gives you a prioritized list of improvements.

Try it now on your site: open Chrome, run Lighthouse as a mobile audit, and review your scores. If you want help interpreting the report or prioritizing fixes, share your results and I can recommend next steps.