Modern websites need modern technologies to meet modern demand.
As a major player in the business, Google wants to help developers in creating websites with modern capabilities by launching a portal dedicated for the job. Simply called web.dev, it allows web developers to run audit on their website, and get scores for performance benchmarks as well as standards for Progressive Web Apps (PWA).
With the tool, developers can also get insights about the best practices, accessibility and SEO.
And not just scores that the tool is showing, as Google also aims it to educate developers on what steps they can take to improve their site's audit.
According to Google:
Initially available as beta, the website has two tabs on top.
The first one, is the 'Learn' tab which allows developers to "Explore our structured learning paths to discover everything you need to know about building for the modern web."
This section breaks down the learning categories into fast loading times, network resilience, safe and secure, easily discoverable, installable and accessible to all.
The second tab, is 'Measure'. Here, developers can type in their website on the available field and see the benchmarks and scores Google has on them:
- Performance: Audits for metrics like first paint and time to interactive to determine lag.
- PWA: Assesses website pages against the baseline Progressive Web App Checklist.
- Accessibility: Checks for common issues that may prevent users from accessing the site's content.
- Best Practices: Showing things like HTTPS usage to correct image aspect ratios.
- SEO: Checks for best practices to ensure the website is discoverable.
Some of the scores extend Google's previous updates on its PageSpeed Insights tool.
There are plenty of tools on the web that give such metrics, and some have popularity surpassing others. It's a tight competition out there.
But Google in giving yet another tool for developers to improve their site, is an honest move from the search engine giant that wants to speed up the entire internet. To name a few, previously Google has introduced mobile scorecard and impact calculator, started sending webmasters notification when their website is slow, and others.
By providing the necessary information about website's performance using various metrics, Google aims to educate developers to create better websites for the world.
Google hopes that developers will take these metrics into consideration, as they will lead to a better user experience for users on their website.
After all, better user experience usually translate to happy visitors, more likes and social shares. And better score may also help those sites to rank better on Google.