Building a Website with High Lighthouse Scores

What are Google Lighthouse Reports?

Earlier this year, Google announced that PageSpeed Insights were now going to be taken into account when it comes to rankings. Meaning that now more than ever, it’s extremely important to have a website that’s built properly.

As a web developer in East Sussex who is always learning and finding new ways of bettering the way I work, I was keen to make sure that I could make a website that scored 100 in all 4 factors measured in Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

Researching Best Practices

As I have never strayed away from building a website using WordPress, it was important to me that whatever frameworks I used to code my new website; it needed to be in WordPress. It’s a bit like the tomato sauce base that starts off every good bolognese.

After doing some research, I had found the Laravel Framework, and how it could be used alongside TailwindCSS to make a website that would run efficiently.

After 2 months of development, and experimenting with different caching plugins. I’m pleased to say I made it!

Keep Things Simple

What has become clear from this project is the emphasised importance of keeping things simple. As has always been the case; keep plugins to a minimum, avoid too many large requests, stay away from bloated Javascript code that you just copy and paste from the internet (I’ve definitely been guilty of this in the past!), and keep images as small as possible (without affecting the quality, of course).

The final key to the secret of getting a G-100 website was an efficient caching plugin. As my website runs on a Litespeed server, it made sense to use the Litespeed Caching Plugin. This, coupled with converting the majority of larger images to .WebP formats helped to get all the scores into the green.

Of course, I did have to work through some of the extra recommendations that Pagespeed Insights provides, these were all small things, that were easily remedied. I like to think that this website is now a Lighthouse approved website.

And there you have it, a bespoke WordPress website, that I like to see as the benchmark for all my future website builds.

If you have any questions or would like to recommend anything that I could do to improve my website, please get in touch!