What's new in Lighthouse 11

Adam Raine
Adam Raine
GitHub
Jasmine Yan
Jasmine Yan
GitHub

Lighthouse is a website auditing tool that helps developers with opportunities and diagnostics to improve the user experience of their sites.

Lighthouse 11 is available immediately on the command line through npm, in Chrome Canary, and in PageSpeed Insights. It will land in Chrome stable in Chrome 118.

See the full list of changes in the 11.0 changelog.

Accessibility category updates

Category updates include new automated audits, improved weighting, and prioritized manual audits to help developers make their sites more accessible.

New audits and weighting

Since Lighthouse 10.0, 13 new accessibility audits have been added:

  • aria-allowed-role
  • aria-dialog-name
  • aria-text
  • html-xml-lang-mismatch
  • image-redundant-alt
  • input-button-name
  • label-content-name-mismatch
  • link-in-text-block
  • select-name
  • skip-link
  • table–duplicate-name
  • table-fake-caption
  • td-has-header

In addition to the new audits, the weights of all the audits have been updated to better match the corresponding aXe rule impact levels. See the Lighthouse accessibility scoring documentation for exact details about the new audits and weights.

Manual audit visibility

Lighthouse has always included some manual audits that cannot be tested automatically, but are still included as a checklist to verify important functionality. The manual audit section is now automatically expanded when all the automated audits have passed.

A Lighthouse report showing the manual audits in the accessibility category expanded

This emphasizes that passing all the automated audits and scoring a 100 in accessibility does not guarantee that the audited page is accessible; manual testing is still important. The manual audits have also been reordered to start with the most approachable checks.

Changes to existing audits

Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

INP is no longer experimental, so the metric has been moved from experimental-interaction-to-next-paint to interaction-to-next-paint.

Service workers

A service worker is no longer required for a page to be installable as a PWA in Chrome, so the service-worker check has been removed from the Lighthouse PWA category.

Resource summary

The resource-summary audit has been removed from the Lighthouse report. Network request stats can still be compiled using the hidden network-requests audit:

const {lhr} = await lighthouse('https://example.com');
const networkRequests = lhr.audits['network-requests'].details.items;
const resourceSummary = {};

for (const request of networkRequests) {
  let total = resourceSummary[request.resourceType] || 0;
  total += request.resourceSize;
  resourceSummary[request.resourceType] = total;
}

console.log(resourceSummary);

Legacy navigation

The --legacy-navigation flag for the CLI, the legacyNavigation() function in the Node API, and the "Legacy navigation" checkbox in the DevTools panel have all been removed. This completes a years-long transition in Lighthouse’s infrastructure to support user flows.

Running Lighthouse

Lighthouse is available in Chrome DevTools, npm (as a Node module and a CLI tool), and as a browser extension (in Chrome and Firefox). It also powers several Google services, including PageSpeed Insights.

To try the Lighthouse Node CLI, use the following commands:

npm install -g lighthouse
lighthouse https://www.example.com --view

Get in touch with the Lighthouse team

To discuss the new features, changes in the Lighthouse 11 release, or anything else related to Lighthouse: