There are a number of performance optimizations that can be made or best practices that should be followed when building or configuring a website to improve the performance and user experience. Rigor's Best Practices Score is a high-level numeric score that measures how well or how poorly a site is implementing these performance optimizations.
The Best Practices Score is based on the impact that different optimization have. Some optimizations can have a larger impact on the performance and user experience than others. For example, an unapplied optimization that reduces a page's critical rendering path will impact the overall score more than an unapplied optimization that reduce the number of requests that must be made.
Rigor classifies how an optimization impacts a site into different impact categories, such as those that reduce the number of requests or those that reduce the size of responses. Rigor measures how well a site is implementing each category on a scale from 0-100, the higher the score the better optimized your site is for that category. These scores are weights and combined to create the total Best Practices Score.
This combined approach helps you better understand where a site is doing well, and where the is room for improvement. Let's look at an example:
In the example above, the site has an overall Best Practices score of 44. The score for the Request Count impact category of optimization is 33 out of 100, indicating there is a lot of opportunity for improvement. This category represents 40% of the total score, so improving this would be very important. We can also see that this site has a Latency score of 100, meaning the site has succeeded in implementing optimizations or best practices which reduce latency.
To know what improvements can be made to increase the score of an impact category, you can filter the list of Defects by impact category, as shown below:
