(A quick message from our founder during a busy October)
Hello my friend! You might have seen that we love Google Lighthouse scores. We’re very proud of our development capabilities, which open the door for you too to have really really nice green circles.
We look forward to writing about the other things we’ve been innovating. We’ve just been so busy that we haven’t had the time to! Thank you for that. You make this Dot world go ’round. We are so honored to exist, and that’s because of you.
But here are some things we’ve found in the past two years that we did want to say.
There’s an opportunity cost to everything.
Great Lighthouse scores are difficult to achieve, which means there’s a great deal of time spent honing your website to optimize them. That’s expensive! Unless you’ve optimized all the other parts of your business, you may prefer to spend that money elsewhere. Many of our clients make those hard choices. And they’re the right choice for them.
The cost is ongoing.
That opportunity cost is not a one-time cost, either. Optimizing fonts, images, and videos on a page takes time and accuracy. Creating webM videos is a lost art. This isn’t the place to get paralysis by analysis. Get things done first!
There are conflicts.
Speaking of getting things done, some dynamic elements just won’t make it onto the leaderboard. Designing 20 different text layout elements in a complex hero slider? You’ll meet your marketing goals, but you won’t get a performance 100. Need above-the-fold, high-definition 3D renderings of your famous pet cat? Lighthouse will ding you for layout shift. Even monjibram.com, static site speed machine, has fallen into a rather annoying chasm with its smooth blink page load/unload transitions and accessibility pickers. Lighthouse fails the whole Contentful Paint score, and calls an error on Performance.
And then there were bots! Cyber security for the loss.
There are a million reasons to visit your website, and today at least 50% of those are robots. That number has increased dramatically as AI bots continue to scrape the internet for training and relevance data.
Unfortunately, not all robots are good robots. We recently found that our unnamed but pretty awesome hosting provider is taking very big measures to protect us from them. One of those measures is a bot fight mode which attempts to identify some of the bad bots and stop them from querying the site.
So…
Unfortunately, this “bot fight mode” has a deprecated JavaScript function. It’s built to work on the old, old browsers from a time before it was deprecated
It’s hard not to shed a tear: they’re trying to protect us from the bots and simultaneously hurting our great green pride of yesteryear.
So what?
We’re taking a peek under the hood to see if this is necessary. But while we do we’re quite happy that the site is lickety-split fast without being exposed to more security concerns.
There are many reasons to use an expert. But there may also be many reasons not to have a perfect Google Lighthouse score. We’ll have to report back when we find out more!