Top reasons to use Google Lighthouse 3.0

2 min read

If you create web applications as a profession then you would be definitely needing an auditing tool to check what works and what doesn’t in your app. Google Lighthouse is one such tool.

It saves a lot of time for you to assess your website’s performance and make it better. You can simply put any URL into Google Lighthouse, (with proper permissions of course) and it will audit it for performance issues and will create a separate report for each issue with ways to rectify it. You can use Lighthouse from the chrome dev tools or you can use it with npn tools as well.

Google has announced the release of Lighthouse version 3 in the latest Google I/O conference.

The new features of Lighthouse are mentioned below:

Lighthouse 3 comes equipped with a new audit engine called Lantern. This helps in improved audits and also minimizes the variance between different audits. The reason for improved audits is that Lantern runs the audits in the same CPU and network environments and simulates the app performance in a regular environment.
Lighthouse comes now with a new and improved UI that helps developers to better understand the issues related to their apps and take actionable insights from it.

Image Courtesy: Google

Uniformity of operation: Both the CLI based version as well as the Node.js version have the same set of controls so that it’s easier to use and less confusing for different sets of developers.
Lighthouse has changed their scoring model which now considers 50 out of 100 score as 75 percentile. They have made it systematically harder to achieve the perfect score making the testing and auditing process much more stringent.
4 new audit types have been introduced. The first shows the time to load the first image or text, the second shows the validity of the robots.txt file. The third test shows ways to change videos to gifs and still preserve the video tag to improve the load time. The fourth test enables links to preload before the website loads.
The final report is now distributed into three parts to facilitate the developer’s understanding of the scenario and improve the performance. These are the 1hr report which reports the results of the audit, the artifacts property report which includes the data collected from Chrome, and the final report includes the formatted report HTML/JSON/CSV as a string.

Will these changes impact the way you develop your apps and make them fare better in the crowd? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.