Google Lighthouse

Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. You can run it against any web page, public or requiring authentication. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, and more.

Leankoala uses the standard version of Lighthouse to run audits and provides all collected data within an HTML document that can be downloaded. On the other hand, it is possible to be informed if one of the given scores for performance, SEO, accessibility or progressive web apps drops.

The standard configuration in Leankoala for Lighthouse is very simple. We concentrate on the performance score as we introduced Lighthouse as a replacement for the Google PageSpeed score. That is why we only collect the data for the other metrics but do not alert. 

For the performance score, our standard value is 50. We've chosen this value because it is the average value of websites we analyzed. Google rates the score: 0-40 slow, 50-89 average, 90-100 fast.

In November 2018 Google decided to abandon the PageSpeed score and switch all their audits to Lighthouse. That means that the PageSpeed score cannot be used anymore. Even though the Lighthouse score differs from the old value it is the new standard and should be used from the end of 2018. 

With Leankoala it is possible to be alerted if the scoring drops for one of the four main audits. Nevertheless, Lighthouse provides a lot of detailed information about the single categories and provides best practices and how-tos. The full audit is stored for 30 days in Leankoala and can be found when pressing on the suggestion button at an incident. 

The servers that perform the Lighthouse tests on Leankoala are located on the Internet. This means that they have a faster connection to the examinee. The last, usually slow mile to the browser does not exist here. This means that the data is transferred faster and the measured speed values can deviate. Normally Leankoala shows the best value the website can achieve in terms of performance. In addition, the Internet connection is not throttled during testing.