A new portal by Google has been launched at web.dev that aims to help developers build modern capabilities on their websites and apps. This portal allows you to run an audit against your website and scores against benchmarks for performance, as well as standards for progressive adherence to best practices, accessibility, web apps and SEO.
There are some scores that overlap with the updates PageSpeed Insights tool that was launched November 12.
Another aim of the tool is to educate you on what steps can be taken to help improve your website based on the audit. The learn section breaks down the learning categories into:
- Fast loading times
- Network resilience
- Safe and secure
- Easily discoverable
- Installable
- Accessible to all
These particular categories coincide with the audit scores talked about above.
There are categories that the audit measures, giving you specific advice on how to make small changes that could potentially have a huge impact on improving the score. Here are the categories:
- Performance: Audits for metrics like first paint and time to interactive to determine lag.
- PWA: Assesses your page against the baseline Progressive Web App Checklist.
- Best Practices: Looks for everything from HTTPS usage to correct image aspect ratios.
- SEO: Checks for best practices to ensure your site is discoverable.
- Accessibility: Checks for common issues that may prevent users from accessing your content.
It’s possible to measure even your SEO score. Search Engine Land got dinged, as shown in the image above, on the score because “Links do not have descriptive text.” Google then linked us to this help article with instructions on how to improve our SEO.
It is Google’s hope that if you take these factors into consideration, it could lead to a better user experience for your users on your web site. The better user experience a site can deliver, the more happy your visitors will be, and the more links and social shares you’ll get. Maybe your rankings in Google will go up as well.