Google unveiled recently the news of the publication of its Lighthouse tool, pfor the Firefox web browser, which was provided as a complement for the browser. The Firefox add-on was prepared by the Lighthouse core development team and uses the PageSpeed Insights API to generate reports.
For those unfamiliar with Lighthouse, you should know that it is an open source automated tool for web developers included in Chrome that is designed to improve the quality of web applications.
With Lighthouse, just run a series of tests against the page and then this generates a report on the performance of the page. From here, developers can use the data obtained as indicators., with which they can do to improve their web application.
The plugin allows to identify bottleneck in the performance of web applications, analyze the component loading speed and resource consumption, identify unnecessarily resource-intensive operations in JavaScript, identify problems in the http server configuration, evaluate design optimization for search engine indexing (SEO) and examine the relevance of using web-technology and suitability of a web application for people with disabilities, in addition to supporting the simulation of the application of a weaker CPU and low network bandwidth.
Basically with Google Lighthouse you can inform a lot about the website, including the following:
- How long it takes for the first image or content to appear on a user's screen.
- Whether the robots.txt file for the site is properly formed and trackable
- When users can interact with your page for the first time
- Your site's speed rating
The report is divided into several different sections:
- Performance: that shows you the basics of your site's performance as it is now. This report really focuses on site loading speed more than any other factor.
- Opportunities: that presents opportunities that can help you speed up your site and improve performance. These opportunities are incredibly specific, like enabling text compression.
- Diagnosis: which points out specific issues on your site that need to be addressed, such as having file sizes that are too large and potentially slowing down load times. They will tell you exactly what the problem is, how it is affecting your site, and why it needs to be fixed.
- Progressive Web App- which gives you a detailed audit of your web application and can ensure that your mobile application is reliable and functional for your audience. This is valuable; Many auditing tools do not offer this.
- Accessibility: showing you ways you can make your site more accessible and easier to navigate or use. This should not be ignored, as UX design is essential to the effectiveness of a site.
- Better practices: which explain the best ways to reliably optimize your site, including implementing HTML and displaying images.
- SEO: which takes a closer look at how your site may perform in search engines and the different factors that affect its ranking potential. They'll look at indicators of content quality, traceability, mobile device compatibility, and more, and help you identify new ways to maximize your search engine visibility.
Get Lighthouse
Finally, for those who are interested in installing and testing this add-on, they can search for it in the Firefox add-on store or they can from the link below.
As for those who are Chrome users, as mentioned at the beginning, Lighthouse is integrated directly into the Chrome developer tools, in the "Audits" panel.
Although it is also available as a browser extension, which can be installed from this link.
Regarding how you use this tool both graphically and in CLI mode, you can consult its documentation In the following link.