Simple Guide to Web Optimization

By Owen Isenhart on 7/8/2025

Overview

The shortened attention span that plagues people today makes optimizing your website absolutely critical. The difference between getting a sale versus the user clicking off the site from boredom can come down to milliseconds. So, how can we optimize our website to ensure we don’t lose visitors?

Google Lighthouse

Google Lighthouse is an automated tool that you can run on any web page that gives you insights on the quality of your page. Lighthouse grades on 4 main metrics: performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. Before we can dive into how to fix low scores in these metrics, we first have to understand what they mean.

Understanding & Improving Metrics

Performance

Unsurprisingly, this measures how quickly your website loads, becomes interactive, and feels responsive. The main things that determine your page’s performance are its largest contentful paint (LCP), first input delay (FID), total blocking time (TBT), and cumulative layout shift (CLS). While there are other things, these are typically the first suspects when it comes to resolving poor performance. So how do we improve them? You should compress images and use more modern formats like AVIF and WebP, use a CDN to reduce latency, implement lazy loading and code splitting (or use something like Next.js, which either does it by default or makes it trivially easy to employ), and reduce third-party scripts. There are many more things you can do to shave off some extra milliseconds, but these should cover most of your bases.

Accessibility

Evaluates how usable your site is for people with disabilities by examining qualities like the page’s color contrast between foreground and background, proper use of alt text for images, and an easy-to-navigate page structure. To improve this metric, you should use semantic HTML (using tags like <nav>, <footer>, <article>, etc.) instead of making everything a <div>, include alt text for images, use contrasting colors between the background and text, and overall make the website easy to use.

Best Practices

Focuses on web development standards that keep websites secure. This metric is never really an issue, but things like using HTTPS, fixing console errors, and controlling the size of the page’s content should make sure you’re not docked any points on this metric.

SEO

This score evaluates how well your website is optimized for search engine crawlers to find, rank, and display your content. There can be a lot that goes into this, but the most important include: having a valid robots.txt file (this is what tells the crawlers which URLs they can access on your site), having a <title> tag and meta description for every page, and a mobile friendly design.

Conclusion

While 60s in performance might be fine for your personal projects that only you’ll ever look at, it won’t fly working on any professional or commercial website where user experience, revenue, and brand reputation are on the line. Therefore, it’s probably better to start taking optimization into account now so you’re not struggling later on. Hope this helped!