How To Use Chrome’s Coverage Report For SEO

Transcription:

Hi, I’m Chris Long with Go Fish Digital, and welcome to another episode of “60-Second SEO”.

Today we’re going to talk about how you can use Chrome’s coverage report to find files that have a lot of waste and that you can either reduce or outright remove from your website.

So what we’re going to do is we’re going to first right-click on this page. We’re going to click “Inspect”, it’s going to bring up Chrome Dev Tools. Here we’re going to click this little three dot icon, we’re going to click “Show Console Drawer”, and then here you’re going to see the Coverage report. You’re going to want to click on that if you don’t see it.

And then I’m going to refresh, and then it’s going to reload the page. And then in this “Unused Bytes” section, it’s going to show me all the files with waste. So here I’ll sort by descending. This file is not being used at all to load this page. This file has 86% waste. This file has 78% waste.

So you can use this to start to identify, “Hey, on my website am I loading files that really aren’t being used, that have a lot of HTML, CSS that are JavaScript that aren’t being used?” And should I outright remove those files, only load them on certain page templates or reduce them in size?

This is a great way to be able to figure out which of those files are really hurting your page load times.

About Chris Long

Chris Long is the VP of Marketing at Go Fish Digital. With 10+ years of SEO experience, Chris works unique problems and advanced search situations to help clients improve organic traffic through a deep understanding of Google's algorithm and web technology. Chris has advised on the search strategies for clients such as GEICO, Adobe & The New York Times. He is a contributor for Moz, Search Engine Land, and Search Engine Journal. He is also a speaker at industry conferences such as MozCon, SMX East, BrightonSEO and more.