I just took a quick look at my server logs. And I see that there are some bots that are constantly crawling my site. If that would be search engines, feed readers etc. that wouldn’t be a problem. But this are crawlers by companies whose websites try to sell me some tools to “make SEO easier” and “uncover the strong and weak points of my sites and their competitors”. They are crawling my site and make me pay for the server while they are building indices to sell for big money? I think that sucks.

Inspired by the posts of Kev Quirk and Jake Bauer, I did a Lighthouse test of my website. I wanted to see how good my blog is SEO wise. Some shortcomings were pointed out to me, for example I forgot to add rel="noopener" to external links with target="_blank" and in the mobile view some “tap targets” were too close together, so you could have clicked on the wrong one. I have addressed the problems and improved a few things in my theme. I don’t care that much about SEO, but somehow it’s nicer when Lighthouse confirms that you follow all the best practices, it’s the ambition. There are still a few things I could improve on, but I think then there is never an end.

To do a Lighthouse test, you can either use the “Audits” tab in Chromium-based browsers, or this bookmarklet in Firefox:

javascript:void(document.location='https://googlechrome.github.io/lighthouse/viewer/?psiurl='+escape(document.location)+'&strategy=mobile&category=performance&category=accessibility&category=best-practices&category=seo')