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This is so exhausting, infuriating and perplexing. Just 1 week after managing to claw our LightHouse score up to 90 - its shot back down 72. The arbitrary natu

This is so exhausting, infuriating and perplexing. Just 1 week after managing to claw our LightHouse score up to 90 - its shot back down 72. The arbitrary nature of their weighting is just tiring - and its compounded by the fact that noone actually knows how much this actually impacts SEO.

madeofpalk 5y ago
Is there any indication that Lighthouse affects SEO at all?
- synthmeat 5y ago
  When it completely rolls out during this month, it's going to be tie-breaker which, supposedly, happens a lot more often than people think. Additionally, it's not the Lighthouse score that you need to worry about, but WebVitals (FID, LCP, CLS) and only that for Field data, if your main concern is SEO. Lighthouse is just a general tool that can hint you at performance issues.
- rozenmd 5y ago
  Your performance affects SEO, and people take the Performance Score as measured by Google Lighthouse to be a proxy for how Googlebot will rank their site.
- dr-detroit 5y ago
  Yes. This is the wrong place to ask about SEO most of these cats use duckduckgo
IMTDb 5y ago
Looks to me that you are not. using Lighthouse for the right reasons. Lighthouse isn't there to improve your SEO. It's just a set of heuristics that make you website performance - as perceived by end users - measurable, and thus improvable. They add a quantitative score on a very qualitative process. If you clawed your Lighthouse score to 90, you should have improved your end users experience, and that's what matters. Your score shot back down to 72, you know have new areas to investigate, super cool ! Your SEO will not suddenly improve or worsen due to this change. If you don't, however, address the new advices given by Lighthouse over a long period of time, other websites will, and their UX will be better than yours. And your SEO will reflect that. But that's the game with technology: over time, technology evolves, requirements change, and expectations shift.
- rhdunn 5y ago
  Google's Web Vitals page tracks things like Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), First Contentful Paint (FCP), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). -- All of those metrics are visible in the Performance tab and are recorded by lighthouse. From [1]: "The first reason is that cumulative layout shift will become a ranking factor in May 2021." [1] https://huckabuy.com/2020/12/30/introduction-to-cumulative-layout-shift-for-seo/ https://huckabuy.com/2020/12/30/introduction-to-cumulative-l...
  - eli 5y ago
    But notably the SEO is based on those measurements as reported by actual Chrome users who choose to share data back to Google, which isn't necessarily the same as what lighthouse measures. Also it hasn't happened yet. They pushed the implementation date to a slow rollout starting in "mid-June"
- topicseed 5y ago
  All the publishers I know (being one myself) only care about CWV for SEO.
  - sbarre 5y ago
    Of course they do, but if that's the proxy metric that makes them care about usability and user experience, it's a win-win.
    - topicseed 5y ago
      Agreed! And it surfaces problems we as publishers don't particularly bump into on the say to day so definitely a win-win!
- katzgrau 5y ago
  > Your score shot back down to 72, you know have new areas to investigate, super cool ! I generally do not find it "super cool" when I suddenly/unexpectedly have new areas to investigate. In most cases, the developer dealing with lighthouse scores is someone who just built a website to a client's spec, only to find out that there are things that it flags which are very time consuming to deal with. Set expectations all you want, but they want a near 100%. To do all that work only for the score to drop later makes you as a developer look bad. A client who doesn't know any better will suspect you did faulty work.

madeofpalk 5y ago

Is there any indication that Lighthouse affects SEO at all?

synthmeat 5y ago
When it completely rolls out during this month, it's going to be tie-breaker which, supposedly, happens a lot more often than people think. Additionally, it's not the Lighthouse score that you need to worry about, but WebVitals (FID, LCP, CLS) and only that for Field data, if your main concern is SEO. Lighthouse is just a general tool that can hint you at performance issues.
rozenmd 5y ago
Your performance affects SEO, and people take the Performance Score as measured by Google Lighthouse to be a proxy for how Googlebot will rank their site.
dr-detroit 5y ago
Yes. This is the wrong place to ask about SEO most of these cats use duckduckgo

IMTDb 5y ago

Looks to me that you are not. using Lighthouse for the right reasons. Lighthouse isn't there to improve your SEO. It's just a set of heuristics that make you website performance - as perceived by end users - measurable, and thus improvable. They add a quantitative score on a very qualitative process. If you clawed your Lighthouse score to 90, you should have improved your end users experience, and that's what matters. Your score shot back down to 72, you know have new areas to investigate, super cool ! Your SEO will not suddenly improve or worsen due to this change. If you don't, however, address the new advices given by Lighthouse over a long period of time, other websites will, and their UX will be better than yours. And your SEO will reflect that. But that's the game with technology: over time, technology evolves, requirements change, and expectations shift.

rhdunn 5y ago
Google's Web Vitals page tracks things like Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), First Contentful Paint (FCP), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). -- All of those metrics are visible in the Performance tab and are recorded by lighthouse. From [1]: "The first reason is that cumulative layout shift will become a ranking factor in May 2021." [1] https://huckabuy.com/2020/12/30/introduction-to-cumulative-layout-shift-for-seo/ https://huckabuy.com/2020/12/30/introduction-to-cumulative-l...
- eli 5y ago
  But notably the SEO is based on those measurements as reported by actual Chrome users who choose to share data back to Google, which isn't necessarily the same as what lighthouse measures. Also it hasn't happened yet. They pushed the implementation date to a slow rollout starting in "mid-June"
topicseed 5y ago
All the publishers I know (being one myself) only care about CWV for SEO.
- sbarre 5y ago
  Of course they do, but if that's the proxy metric that makes them care about usability and user experience, it's a win-win.
  - topicseed 5y ago
    Agreed! And it surfaces problems we as publishers don't particularly bump into on the say to day so definitely a win-win!
katzgrau 5y ago
> Your score shot back down to 72, you know have new areas to investigate, super cool ! I generally do not find it "super cool" when I suddenly/unexpectedly have new areas to investigate. In most cases, the developer dealing with lighthouse scores is someone who just built a website to a client's spec, only to find out that there are things that it flags which are very time consuming to deal with. Set expectations all you want, but they want a near 100%. To do all that work only for the score to drop later makes you as a developer look bad. A client who doesn't know any better will suspect you did faulty work.