Google Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights

What Is Google Lighthouse?

Google Lighthouse is a free, open-source, automated tool which runs your web pages through a series of audits and tests and helps you to improve the quality of your web pages. Lighthouse gives you an excellent overview of the quality and performance of your website on the desktop and mobile devices, and helps to improve the performance of your website. Besides, Lighthouse identifies common problems that can affect the quality of your website and provides suggestions on how to fix them.

The data shown on the screenshot below is used for demonstration purposes only.

There are different ways to use Google Lighthouse. The easiest ones are in Google Chrome DevTools or from a web UI. For more information about how to run Google Lighthouse, see Lighthouse.

Which Audits Can Google Lighthouse Perform?

When you run an audit in Google Lighthouse, it produces five scores at the top of your audit report. They are:

  • Performance - This test evaluates the speed at which the web pages load and display on a user’s device to find opportunities to speed up page load. For more information, see Performance audits.

  • Best practices - There is a certain standard in the modern web development. Best practices score shows you if your website fits into this standard. This audit provides recommendations on how to improve the overall code health of your website or web application. For more information, see Best Practices audits.

  • Accessibility - This test checks if all users can access your website or web application and navigate effectively regardless of limitations or disabilities. There are also recommendations on how to improve the accessibility of your website. For more information, see Accessibility audits.

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - SEO checks evaluate how well your website can be crawled by search engines and displayed in the search results. For more information, see SEO audits.

  • Progressive Web Apps (PWA) - A progressive web application takes advantage of the latest technologies to combine the best of web and mobile apps. You can think of a website that acts and feels like an app. This means that your website can be used as a kind of simplified app. The PWA audits measure if your website is fast, reliable and installable. For more information, see PWA audits.

    NOTE

    Although the Sana webstore supports some of the features used in Progressive Web Applications (PWA), it is still a Single Page Application (SPA) and not a PWA. Therefore, the Google Lighthouse PWA audit results will be inaccurate and you should not select Progressive Web App when testing your Sana webstore.

 

What Is Google PageSpeed Insights and How Is It Different from Google Lighthouse?

PageSpeed Insights is another tool created by Google. PageSpeed Insights is an online tool which evaluates the performance of the web page on mobile, tablet and desktop computer. It also offers practical suggestions on how to improve the web page. PageSpeed Insights uses Lighthouse as its performance analysis engine.

One major difference between Google Lighthouse and Google PageSpeed Insights is the data they use. Lighthouse uses only lab data to measure your website’s performance, while PageSpeed Insights uses both real-world data which comes from the Chrome User Experience report and lab data. Lab data uses predefined network and device specifications and also lab data is collected in a controlled environment. Real-world data is collected from the actual Chrome users, meaning that you can see how your website loads for real users.

The other difference is that Google PageSpeed Insights measures only the performance of the website, while Google Lighthouse goes beyond page speed metric and measures other aspects of a website, like SEO, accessibility, progressive web app, etc.

Use the Google PageSpeed Insights web page to measure your website performance.

The data shown on the screenshot below is used for demonstration purposes only.

You can use Google PageSpeed Insights and Google Lighthouse, or even the mix of multiple tools to get the most accurate picture of your website performance.