Testing Performance, Speed and Best Practices with Lighthouse

Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of your web apps.

Web Development is an ever changing landscape, and as such we use a variety of tools to evaluate what we do. Like many others with a vested interest in the web, Google has its own projects, and Lighthouse is one of them.

I find the Lighthouse tool particularly interesting for two reasons — firstly because it looks at a few of the more recent specs like Progressive Web Apps and the difficult-to-evaluate concepts like perceived speed, and secondly because it’s developed by Google, which implies that it’s looking at the kind of website optimisations that Google cares about when indexing a website.

What Lighthouse checks

A few of the things that Lighthouse currently tests for are:

• Offline/flaky connection support
• Page load performance
• Progressive Enhancement
• Secure connection (HTTPS)
• Mobile-friendliness
• Page render speed / avoiding “jank”
• Modern accessibility tags

Running Lighthouse

There are two ways to run a set of Lighthouse tests. One method is through a Chrome Extension, which you can install through the Chrome Web Store or as a Node module on NPM.

And if you’re interested in an example report, take a look at the report for www.psyked.co.uk

Originally published at www.psyked.co.uk on January 28, 2017.