5 Min Read
Website performance is not just a technical concern–it’s a key driver of business success.
The scores in Google’s Lighthouse testing tool quantify website performance. High scores reflect optimized performance, while low scores identify shortcomings that can significantly affect your bottom line–especially if you rely on the website for brand awareness and lead generation.
Lighthouse audits review four key components of a website's performance, including:
- SEO – Lighthouse examines whether your site includes basic requirements and best practices for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- Accessibility – Lighthouse detects whether your website violates basic accessibility requirements, including descriptive image text and visual contrast; importantly, Lighthouse notes "Only a subset of accessibility issues can be automatically detected" and you will need a manual audit to be considered compliant under ADA and other laws.
- Best Practices – Your Lighthouse score for Best Practices reflects how well your website meets minimum requirements and recommendations for code structure, imagery, and security.
- Performance – Lighthouse's Performance score quite literally measures the speed and performance of the website, measuring the time it takes for content and media to load and scoring it against thresholds for high-quality user experiences, including Core Web Vitals that affect your SEO.
- PWA – If your site is built as a PWA (Progressive Web App), Lighthouse will verify the site meets all PWA requirements.
By understanding how low scores may impact the business goals for a website, marketers and IT leaders can more easily make their case to decision makers when a company website may need additional work to increase its Lighthouse scores so that it will organically attract more search traffic and effectively convert more website visitors into new business.
How Poor-Performing Business Websites Impact the Bottom Line
High Lighthouse scores indicate a well-optimized website with fast loading times, seamless user experience, and adherence to industry standards. On the other hand, low Lighthouse scores highlight areas of concern that can profoundly impact various aspects of a business.
Fewer Visitors Convert
Poor-performing websites need help to convert visitors into sales leads or customers due to usability issues–including slow loading times, security deficiencies, and accessibility.
These deficiencies often result in lower conversion rates and missed business opportunities as competitors with high-performing websites siphon prospects away from low-performers.
Negative Brand Perceptions
Low Lighthouse scores reflect poorly on the brand's image and reputation. Visitors may perceive the website as outdated, unreliable, or untrustworthy, negatively impacting brand perception and seeding doubts about your commitment to quality that can erode customer trust.
Wasted Marketing Efforts
Subpar user experiences can impact ROI for businesses directly through increased ad costs and reduced ad performance, as Google and other digital advertising platforms factor website performance into ad quality scores, affecting bid costs, impressions, and overall effectiveness of online ad campaigns.
When a website performs poorly, users are also less likely to engage with content on landing pages, leading to lower conversion rates and ROI. This drives up direct costs through higher bid prices and indirectly impacts business profitability by limiting the reach and effectiveness of advertising campaigns.
Increased Maintenance Costs
Poorly developed websites with low Lighthouse scores incur increased maintenance costs. They contribute to higher hosting costs due to increased server loads. These sites require ongoing fixes and optimizations to address performance issues, usability concerns, and accessibility barriers, leading to a drain on resources.
Conversely, high-performance scores result in more efficient use of resources and lower hosting costs, making them a more cost-effective long-term investment.
Opening the Door to Hackers
Websites can score poorly in Lighthouse when they are more susceptible to security breaches, potentially indicating that your "digital front door" is wide open to hackers. These vulnerabilities extend beyond lacking HTTPS/SSL encryption, to include issues such as poor or outdated code.
Hackers often exploit these kinds of weaknesses to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data, compromise user accounts, or inject malicious code into the website.
Competitive Disadvantages
Websites with low Lighthouse scores face a competitive disadvantage when competitors offer higher-performing sites with superior user experiences. Without addressing the issues flagged by a Lighthouse audit, websites will struggle to attract and retain visitors, capture additional market share, and stay ahead of their competition.
Legal and Compliance Risks
Failing to achieve high Lighthouse scores may signal non-compliance with industry standards, accessibility regulations, or data privacy requirements. This failure exposes the website to legal risks, fines, and reputational damage.
Lower Search Engine Rankings
Poor scores in Lighthouse may reveal issues that affect a website's SEO, such as a lack of mobile-friendliness, absence of structured data (schema markup), or inadequate technical optimization.
Left unfixed, these issues could lead to diminished search engine visibility for your business and a steady decline in organic search traffic to your website.
High Bounce Rate
Underperforming Lighthouse scores for your website frequently correlate with a high bounce rate, as visitors swiftly exit the site due to sluggish loading times, poor usability, or low-quality content.
The higher your website's Lighthouse scores, the more likely its user experience will satisfy visitors and engage them well enough to avoid "bouncing" them off.
Why You Should Regularly Check And Improve Lighthouse Scores
The bottom-line impact of poor-performing websites is substantial and multi-faceted, which is why maintenance is important. Regularly checking and optimizing a website's Lighthouse scores isn't just about technical optimization—it's about ensuring a seamless and cohesive user experience, driving conversions, enhancing brand reputation, and staying competitive online.
It's not enough to have one or two scores in the “Good” range with a 90-plus score and think you can just "set it and forget it."
Ensuring all aspects of your website's performance scored in Lighthouse are in the Excellent range is crucial for maximizing the benefits and minimizing negative impacts.
Remember, Lighthouse is free and easy to use–here's a quick guide on using Lighthouse to test your website.
After you run Lighthouse to get your scores, jot down your and your competitor’s scores using this free form. We can discuss the results with you.
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