With the belief that every developer should have the access to learn and develop capabilities they need to make a great web experience, Google has come up with a new portal that will help users to build websites and apps with enhanced capabilities. Currently, in the beta version, the portal can be accessed at web.dev.
Developers could run an audit against their websites using the portal which then scores it. Scoring is based against various performance benchmarks, standards for progressive apps, adherence to best quality practices, search engine optimization (SEO) and accessibility. Some of the features of this portal are derived from PageSpeed Insights tool which is also a Google product, therefore some of the scores of the portal overlap.
Salient features of the tool:
Mentorship: This tool also educates and provides suggestions to improve your website based on the audit report. Using the learn section of the portal, one could explore and learn how to reduce loading times, enhance discoverability, installability, and accessibility, safety and security etc. All these learnings are categorized for easy selection of work areas by the developers.
Source- Medium
Source- Channel Futures
Audit Report: The scoring is done on the following five metrics:
1. Performance: metrics include first paint, time to interactive etc
2. PWA: checks against baseline Progressive Web App Checklist
3. Best Practices: checks everything in the site like image aspect ratio, https usage etc
4. SEO: checks for practices that ensure the website’s discoverability
5. Accessibility: checks for glitches and issues that might hinder users from accessing the website’s content
Google hopes that working on these metrics will provide a better user experience.
Source- Search Engine Land
