Audit your web application with Google Lighthouse.

Today, my coworker showed us Lighthouse, a cool feature that is available in Google Chrome to quickly evaluate a performance of a website. I thought the name is pretty cool; it reminds me of the book I read before, “The Lights Between Oceans”. I just learned about Lighthouse even though the tool has been around since 2017. You specify the URL of the website you want Lighthouse to evaluate, the tool then runs a series of tests and in about thirty seconds or less, you get a report. In the report, you can see scores for: performance, accessibility, best practices, SEO and PWA. Besides showing the score, the tool also offers suggestions to address some of the issues it found. For instance, one of the angular web application I have is running with a development, non-optimized build. When I ran Lighthouse against the app, the tool showed me a low performance score of 0 as well as suggesting a couple fixes including minifying JavaScript, enabling text compression, adjusting image sizes …

Now that I know about the tool, I definitely use it when working on a web application to ensure we address issues that could degrade the user’s experiences sooner rather than later.

You can find the tool in Chrome’s Developer tools, under Audits. For more information, checkout the document.