“Measuring not just performance, but understanding.”

When we first ran Lighthouse on wakaran-eng.com,
we didn’t expect the results to feel like a mirror.
A mirror that didn’t just show scores —
but showed how much we understood (or didn’t understand)
about our own website.

At that moment, WakaranEng was still young.
We had built the core structure, launched the first pages,
and connected the WordPress headless CMS.
Everything was working — at least from the outside.

But Lighthouse had another story to tell.

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📊 Our First Score

Here’s the actual screenshot from our very first audit:

The results came back in the yellow zone:

• Performance: 100
• Accessibility: 96
• Best Practices: 70
• SEO: 85

It wasn’t terrible.
But it wasn’t great either.
More importantly — it was honest.

And that honesty became the starting point for this entire series.

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🔍 What the First Audit Revealed

1. YouTube embeds were dragging us down

Heavy scripts. Player assets. Analytics calls.
Even if the visitor never clicked “play”, the iframe loaded everything.

2. Render-blocking resources

Fonts, scripts, and layout elements weren’t optimized
for how browsers prioritize work.

3. Locale mistakes affecting SEO

One simple oversight:
lang="en" instead of the correct lang="en-US"
caused SEO warnings and confused search engines.

“One character can help or hurt more than an entire framework.”

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🧭 Why This Series Exists

We could have ignored those numbers.
But WakaranEng isn’t just a website —
it’s a learning log.

Every metric is feedback.
Every mistake is a chance to understand the web more deeply.

So we decided to document everything:
what Lighthouse caught, how we fixed it, what improved,
and what we learned in the process.

“The web teaches you the same way English does —
little mistakes, big lessons.”

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💡 What Comes Next

These are the three upcoming posts in this mini-series:

#2 – The YouTube Problem

How a single iframe dropped our score —
and how we rebuilt it with lazy-loaded thumbnails.

#3 – Small Fix, Big Impact: The Lang Tag Mistake

How en-US fixed warnings across the entire site.

#4 – Writing for AI Search Engines

Optimizing WakaranEng for AI crawlers and LLM interpreters.

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✨ Reflection

Running Lighthouse wasn’t just a technical check.
It was a reminder that clarity matters —
in code, in content, in learning.

This series isn’t about chasing “perfect 100s”.
It’s about getting a little clearer,
day by day, fix by fix.

“We don’t aim for perfection —
only for a little more understanding every day.”