Lighthouse is a free tool built into Google Chrome that scores any web page from 0 to 100 in four areas: performance (speed), accessibility, best practices, and technical SEO. Anyone can run it on any site, including a competitor’s, which makes it a rare honest yardstick.
The scores are graded on a curve built from the real web, so a high one is harder than it looks. On the speed score, 90 and up is roughly the top 8 percent of the web (Google’s own scoring curve), and the median site scores 48 out of 100 on the mobile test (HTTP Archive, 2026). Most sites, in other words, are slower than their owners think.
For a small business, Lighthouse turns “is my site any good” into something you can measure in about a minute. It reports on the Core Web Vitals, including LCP, and flags plenty that ordinary SEO cares about.
I build to score well here, and I would rather show you the number than describe it. Run Lighthouse on your current site and a competitor’s, then compare. The gap is usually wide and usually fixable, which is the whole reason I show a free preview first.