Google Lighthouse powered speed test

Google Lighthouse based speed testing has arrived in Silktide Prospect. This makes it easier to talk to your clients about their mobile performance and why they need a faster website.

What is Google Lighthouse?

Lighthouse is a Google web page audit project. It’s a great tool for developers to get visibility on how a single page performs, and what actions need to be taken to improve it.

Silktide Prospect now integrates Google Lighthouse speed test data in a new Mobile speed test. Including best-in-class Lighthouse data alongside our SEO, SEM, social and local audits makes for an even more comprehensive branded report.

Why should I upgrade?

Silktide Prospect has included website speed testing for some time – so what does the new Lighthouse based audit offer?

Greater alignment with Google tools

Greater alignment with the Google toolkit means your agents have fewer difficult questions to answer in sales conversations. Although our existing speed test results are accurate and valid, our testing methodology and environment differs from Google. For sales agents being put on the spot this can be tricky to explain.

More detailed results

We’ve taken great care to simplify the Lighthouse output and ensure the results are easy for everyone to understand. Even so, the output is more detailed than our previous mobile speed test.

As well as an overall performance score out of 100, three key timings are shown: First content displayed, Major content displayed and Fully interactive. Clear visuals illustrate what each timing means – no specialist technical know-how is required.

If your sales team are comfortable with a greater level of technical detail, you can optionally enable a table of improvement opportunities to be shown.

How do I enable it?

To enable the new test yourself, just head over to test settings and enable Mobile speed (Lighthouse). Don’t forget to give the new test an appropriate weighting, and to disable the old Mobile speed test (we don’t recommend you have both enabled).

Alternatively, reach out to your Silktide Prospect Customer Success Manager who will be happy to help you manage migration to the new Lighthouse based mobile speed test.

You don’t need to upgrade if you don’t want to – our existing website speed test that measures the speed of a website in a real browser, and is calibrated to closely match the “Think with Google” tool, will continue to be supported.