What Is a Lighthouse Score and Why Should Your Miami Business Care?

If you have ever had a web designer mention “Lighthouse scores” and nodded politely without knowing what they meant – this article is for you.

What Google Lighthouse Measures

Lighthouse is Google’s open-source tool for measuring website quality across four categories, each scored from 0-100.

Performance (most critical)

How fast your site loads, especially on mobile. Key metrics include Largest Contentful Paint (how quickly your main content appears), First Input Delay (how quickly your site responds to clicks), and Cumulative Layout Shift (how stable your page is as it loads). Google uses these Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor.

Accessibility

Whether your site can be used by people with disabilities – proper image alt text, sufficient color contrast, keyboard navigation, ARIA labels. Also a ranking factor and a legal consideration under ADA.

Best Practices

Security (HTTPS), no deprecated APIs, proper image formats, no browser errors in the console. The technical hygiene of your site.

SEO

Whether your site is properly configured for search engine crawling and indexing – meta descriptions, canonical tags, structured data, mobile viewport, crawlable links.

What Scores to Target

90+ is considered good. 95+ is excellent. Red Rooster Web targets 95-100 on all four metrics on every site we build. The average small business WordPress site built with page builders like Elementor templates or Divi scores 45-70 on Performance.

How to Check Your Score

Go to pagespeed.web.dev and enter your URL. Run it in mobile mode – that is the score that matters most for rankings.