Lighthouse 2.8 Updates

Paul Irish
Kayce Basques

Lighthouse 2.8 is out! Highlights include:

See the 2.8 release notes for the full list of new features, changes, and bug fixes.

How to update to 2.8

  • NPM. Run npm update lighthouse, or npm update lighthouse -g flag if you installed Lighthouse globally.
  • Chrome Extension. The extension should automatically update, but you can manually update it via chrome://extensions.
  • DevTools. The Audits panel will be shipping with 2.8 in Chrome 65. You can check what version of Chrome you're running via chrome://version. Chrome updates to a new version about every 6 weeks. You can run the latest Chrome code by downloading Chrome Canary.

New Performance and SEO audits

The Avoid Plugins audit lists plugins that you should remove, since plugins prevent the page from being mobile-friendly. Most mobile devices don't support plugins.

The Avoid Plugins audit.
Figure 1. The Avoid Plugins audit

The Document Has A Valid rel=canonical audit in the SEO category checks for a rel=canonical URL to make sure that a crawler knows which URL to show in search results.

The Document Has A Valid rel=canonical audit.
Figure 2. The Document Has A Valid rel=canonical audit

The Page Is Mobile-Friendly and Structured Data Is Valid manual audits can help further improve your SEO. "Manual" in this case means that Lighthouse can't automate these audits, so you need to test them yourself.

The manual SEO audits.
Figure 3. The manual SEO audits

The Minify CSS and Minify JavaScript audits in the Performance category check for any CSS or Javascript that can be minified to reduce payload size and parse time.

The Minify CSS and Minify JavaScript audits.
Figure 4. The Minify CSS and Minify JavaScript audits

Performance as the first category in Lighthouse reports

Performance is now the first category you see in Lighthouse reports. Some users thought that Lighthouse was only for Progressive Web Apps, since that was the first category in reports. In reality, Lighthouse can help you understand how to improve any web page, whether or not it's a Progressive Web App.

Updated Accessibility scoring

If an accessibility audit is not applicable for a given page, that audit no longer counts towards the Accessibility score.

New loading message and fast facts

The loading message and fast facts in Chrome DevTools.
Figure 5. The loading message and fast facts in Chrome DevTools

New Lighthouse release guide

Check out the Release Guide For Maintainers for information on release timing, naming conventions, and more.