A few very interesting discussions on Twitter have led me to understand that some folks are talking about Lighthouse scores in a way that is—in my o

The Art of Deception, Lighthouse Score Edition—zachleat.com

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2021-10-20 17:30:08

A few very interesting discussions on Twitter have led me to understand that some folks are talking about Lighthouse scores in a way that is—in my opinion—not as forthright as it could be (intentionally or not). Let’s level set a bit and talk a bit about the different flavors of wiggle room:

Here’s a screenshot of a Lighthouse result from this morning, October 14th, 2021, run on an old MacBook Air (2012) using Chrome 86.

It’s incredible to me the variability effect that your hardware can have: from a 64 on Performance to a 94—that’s a thirty point swing!

As additional context, I built a project called Speedlify, which is a self-hosted dashboard for performance monitoring and comparison. We use it on the Eleventy Leaderboards.

Speedlify has two common modes of operation: on a hosted CI/CD server or in DIY mode on your local machine. These two methods often provide different Performance scores! Running on a hosted server is typically more resource constrained and is more challenging to score well in Lighthouse’s Performance category.

For disclosure purposes, the Eleventy Leaderboards run in DIY mode primarily because the scale of the number of sites tested goes well beyond the build-time limit of the build server—but that does also mean that the scores are likely higher than if we were to able to run the project in hosted mode.