There’s a long list of Google Web developers tools. All of which try to make a developer’s life easier. After all, a Web developer’s primary aim is to make Sites to everybody’s satisfaction. This aim, however, is fraught with multiple problems – while developers learn what is required to construct a Web efficient code, algorithms employed by the major search engines are ever-shifting, so it’s very important to stay abreast of these directives issued by search engines. All this is necessary to gain indexing in SERP (Search Engine Result Pages).
What then are developers to do, if they fail to keep up with the trends & fail to communicate accepted practices to clients? Well, Google has found a way to speak to clients on Web developers’ behalf, & its answer is ‘Lighthouse’, a Web specification tool. All this is part of the Google Web Developers tools list.
Google has come to Web developers’ aid:
- It has provided a tool to assess Sites for compliance with ‘best practices’, via Lighthouse
- It has also set-up a comprehensive learning resource to assist developers in attaining a perfect Lighthouse score
Clients might not always want to follow their developer’s advice, but there are few who will argue with Google. That said, let’s dig deeper into the mechanisms Google has laid at developers’ feet.
Web.dev, currently in beta, is a compilation of resources created by Google’s developers to measure websites for ‘best practice’ compliance. Developers simply need to add the URL of the Site they wish to test & Lighthouse, Google’s Web specification tool, will produce a score for the said URL & a list of all areas where improvement is required. Results are made up of various sections to make it easier for developers & designers to concentrate on 1 area at a time.
The Lighthouse audit checks for : performance, PWA (Progressive Web Apps), accessibility, best practices & SEO, then generates a list which developers can use to fix any issues which are not up to scratch.
Suggestions for optimization include many methods for improving page-load speeds, which make Websites more ‘mobile-friendly’, compressing images, minifying Javascript (CSS files), eliminating document.write() from Javascript, splitting CSS files, creating improved accessibility by including ‘alt’ tags inside ‘image’ tags, & many others. The thing to note, here, though, is that once the report is compiled, Google goes a step further by offering detailed tips & tricks for fixing errors. Developers can join their free, Online Website improvement course & return to check the results once they’ve employed Google’s methods.
Overall, web.dev is going to make life a lot easier for developers & give them a metrics report, which they can show to clients to prove that they’ve built Websites which follow the rules.
Image Credit: Google
