Google Lighthouse To Undergo Major Audit Overhaul: What To Know

Google has announced plans to renovate the audit of the performance of the lighthouse.

The new version will match the recently launched insights on the Chrome Devtools performance board.

This shift will change how to organize and represent performance data, which affects SEO professionals who use lighthous to optimize websites.

Background: a combination of Google’s performance tools

This update It is part of Google’s effort to consolidate its different performance tools.

Barry Pollard from Google’s chrome team explains::

“We update the audit in the lighthouse to be based on the same insights we recently launched on the Chrome Devtools performance board. This will help to reconcile two tools, but there will be a violent change.”

What is changing: renamed, combined and removed by audits

The upcoming changes belong to three main categories:

1. Connection and renaming audit

Many existing lighthous audits will get new names and connect. For example:

• Three separate audits (“shifts from appearance”, “unprepared animation” and “entered images”) will be combined into one audit “CLS Culprits Insight”.
• Several audits for the optimization of the painting will be combined into one audit “-added paintings”.

This connection means that you can no longer exclude the individual parts of these combined audits. You will need to turn on or exclude the entire review of insight.

Note, this is not a comprehensive list. For a complete list of renamed and consolidated audits, see Google announcement.

2. Removal of audit

Several audits will be removed in full, including:

• First meaningful color (replaced with the highest content color)
• No document (rarely a problem in modern scripts)
• Offscreen images (browsers already process them well)
• Uses the listeners of passive events (rarely a problem today)
• Used rel in advance (too often recommended when necessary)
• Third -party facades (limited utility and potential concern)

3. The new organization

New insight audits will appear under the heading “insight” in reports. The unchanged audit will remain entitled “Diagnostics”.

Time line for changes

Google will introduce these changes in stages:

• Now: New insights are already available at JSON output for early adopters
• May/June 2025. (Chrome 137): Lighthouse 12.6 will include switching to switch between old and new views
• June: Lighthouse 12.7 will use new inspection audits according to default settings
• October: Lighthouse 13 will fully eliminate the old audit data

Pollard confirms:

“This has now been published on Pagespeed Insights and will be involved in Chrome 137 in about a month.”

How to prepare

Here’s what to do to prepare:

1. Use a lighthouse 12.6.0.
2. If you use certain audit names in reports or analysis, start updating them
3. Update all systems that use lighthouse data
4. Explain why the performance reports will look different later this year

Pollard advises:

“Another lighthouse tool (for example, if you use this in your CI), it can also start to migrate to these insights based on these revisions-are now available in JSON exits.”

What does that mean

Google continues to emphasize the experience of the page and the basic web vital vital data in its ranking algorithm. The basic metrics remain unchanged, but reorganization will affect how you identify and solve performance problems.

Connected audits can provide a comprehensive overview of related performance problems. This could make it easier to spot the samples and prioritize. However, the teams that have built customized tools around certain audits of the lighthouse will need to be adjusted.

Looking forward

Google will publish documentation on new insights on developer.chrome.com before the change in October. They will keep older documentation available to users of the previous versions of the lighthouse.

If you have concerns about these changes, Google has opened a Girlub Discussion to collect feedback and answer questions.

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Sepaled image: Brucephotography103/Shutterstock