How Lighthouse Scores Affect Your Law Firm's Website

Empowering Law Firms with Digital Technologies

Every website is a piece of technology. They are designed differently, some perform faster than others, and depending on how they were built they can age differently. What does this mean for your law firm's site? Is it affecting your user's experience? Is it affecting how long potential clients stay on your site? Does my website's specs affect whether or not your firm's page shows up on Google?

In this article, we will try to answer a few questions:

  • What are lighthouse scores?
  • What do lighthouse scores mean for my firm's website?
  • How to run a lighthouse test on my firm’s site?
  • How do I increase my firm’s lighthouse scores?

What are lighthouse scores?

Lighthouse scores consist of 5 categories: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, SEO (search engine optimization), and Progressive Web App. Performance is best thought of as how quickly your site is predicted to load anytime a user attempts to load it. Accessibility is a metric that measures how accessible your site is for someone with disabilities. Best Practices is a measurement of the 'health of the website' and highlights where you can improve the code of the website. SEO ensures that the page is optimized for search results rankings. Progressive Web Apps are not typically used by law firms but are utilized by larger companies that have applications like Twitter and Hilton.

The scores are a measurement of how Google views your law firm's site. The scores give you an idea of how to better improve your site so it shows up for searches. Google wants to show the fastest and most relevant sites to its users, encouraging users to continue using their site for searching. This means that Google prefers your site to load quickly and efficiently (performance and best practices), be usable for those with disabilities (accessibility), and be relevant for search queries (SEO). Your firm wants to be "in the green," meaning receiving a score between 90 - 100 on each metric, which greatly increases the chances of your site showing up on a search.

In contrast to being in the green, below is an example of a website that has room to improve. You can run your lighthouse score on your own! This can be done by the following steps:

How to run a lighthouse test on my firm’s site?

  1. Download Google Chrome for Desktop.
  2. In Google Chrome, go to the URL you want to audit. You can audit any URL on the web.
  3. Open Chrome DevTools (right-click on the page and click inspect at the bottom of the list).
  4. Click the Lighthouse tab.
  5. Click "Analyze Page Load" (this should take about 60 seconds).
  6. Receive your scores.

Based on the results, you now have areas of your site you could improve.

How do I increase my firm’s lighthouse scores?

How could you increase your law firm's website’s lighthouse scores so that Google favors you in searches? You could increase performance in several ways. You could rewrite and maintain your site's code to better fit Google’s evolving standards. You could ensure that your site's content is structured in a way that can be easily read by a screen reader for those with disabilities. You could read about, implement, and maintain changes to the written content structure to improve SEO. Or you could let experts handle all of that. Technologic has a proven track record of bringing in more business through online acquisition. Our websites are top-of-the-line and maintained to stay that way. We do not just take your advertising budget and spend, spend, spend. We are constantly monitoring our efforts to bring your firm’s cost per case acquisition down! If you do not know your firm’s cost per case acquisition, let our team help you figure that out!