Lighthouse Testing tool — 2 : Lighthouse Report
The performance of a web page is one of the key factors that affect the user experience. To optimize the performance of a website, it is important to measure and identify what needs to be fixed and how it is done. For this very purpose, you can use the report generated by the Lighthouse testing tool.
So how should you read this lighthouse report? Let’s take a look at this lighthouse report.
Lighthouse reports are just one click away, once you start testing. It is very easy to generate a report. All you have to do is just open chrome dev tools, select testing criteria and click on Generate Report button.
Once the report is generated it looks similar to this.
Lighthouse runs audits in 4 main categories. At the top of the report, Lighthouse displays the score of each audit category between 0 and 100. This includes only the categories you choose to run audits.
The report continues covering each audit category separately with category score, metrics, and audit.
Category score generated considering the overall performance of the page related to the audit category. If the page score is 90–100 it is a good score, while 50–89 is considered intermediate and 0–49 is considered as poor.
If we consider the category performance in the report, the performance score displays at the top of the performance section in the report. Then it shows the metrics used to measure the category score. Each metric has a weight. You can view the Lighthouse Scoring calculator by clicking on the “see calculator” link given in the report.
Then it lists out the opportunities that are applicable in optimizing the performance. Lighthouse audits to evaluate the web page and list out possible issues. More importantly, it provides indications on how to fix these issues. These recommendations in the Lighthouse report are mostly best practices and frontend optimization techniques to follow.
You can save the Lighthouse reports as pdf in summary form or expanded form. Also, you can save the report as HTML or JSON.
However, you can customize the report by selecting audit categories before you start testing. Furthermore, you can use other integrations and automate Lighthouse to collect and keep historical records and to compare the results over time. There are many integrations out there to use with the Lighthouse.
Overall, using this report, you can understand and optimize the performance of your website. It can also use to measure and compare your performance to the performance of your competitors. If you use the Lighthouse report correctly, you can achieve good results in your website performance.
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