Google launches portal to help developers build modern web sites

Google has launched a new portal at web.dev that aims to help developers build modern capabilities on their websites and apps. The portal lets you run an audit against your website and scores it against benchmarks for performance as well as standards for progressive web apps, adherence to best practices, accessibility and SEO.

Some of the scores overlap with the updates PageSpeed Insights tool that was launched Monday.

Next steps suggestions. The tool also aims at educating you on what steps you can take to improve your web site based on the audit. The learn section breaks down the learning categories into fast loading times, network resilience, safe and secure, easily discoverable, installable and accessible to all. These categories coincide with the audit scores as illustrated above.

The audit. The audit measures these categories and gives you specific advice on how to make small changes that may have a big impact on improving the score. These categories include:

• Performance: Audits for metrics like first paint and time to interactive to determine lag.
• PWA: Assesses your page against the baseline Progressive Web App Checklist.
• Best Practices: Looks for everything from HTTPS usage to correct image aspect ratios.
• SEO: Checks for best practices to ensure your site is discoverable.
• Accessibility: Checks for common issues that may prevent users from accessing your content.

Measure your SEO score. Yes, you can even measure your SEO score. You can see this site, in the screenshot above, got dinged on the score because of “Links do not have descriptive text.” Google then linked us to this help article with instructions on how to improve our SEO.

Why does it matter? Will our search rankings improve if we fix the descriptive text issue with our links? I doubt it. But overall, Google hopes that if you take these factors into consideration, it will lead to a better user experience for your users on your web site. A better user experience may lead to more happy visitors, more links, more social shares and who knows — maybe better rankings in Google as a result.