Funnily enough the biggest offender of Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) metric in my daily life is google search with its "people also search for" feature that causes me to constantly misclick.
It's good to see that they've added a Content-Security-Policy related test. I checked and Lighthouse 8.0.0 still penalizes you on "best practices" if your CSP does not allow inline styles.
This is so exhausting, infuriating and perplexing.
Just 1 week after managing to claw our LightHouse score up to 90 - its shot back down 72. The arbitrary nature of their weighting is just tiring - and its compounded by the fact that noone actually knows how much this actually impacts SEO.
Looks to me that you are not. using Lighthouse for the right reasons.
Lighthouse isn't there to improve your SEO. It's just a set of heuristics that make you website performance - as perceived by end users - measurable, and thus improvable. They add a quantitative score on a very qualitative process.
If you clawed your Lighthouse score to 90, you should have improved your end users experience, and that's what matters. Your score shot back down to 72, you know have new areas to investigate, super cool ! Your SEO will not suddenly improve or worsen due to this change. If you don't, however, address the new advices given by Lighthouse over a long period of time, other websites will, and their UX will be better than yours. And your SEO will reflect that. But that's the game with technology: over time, technology evolves, requirements change, and expectations shift.
Google's Web Vitals page tracks things like Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), First Contentful Paint (FCP), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). -- All of those metrics are visible in the Performance tab and are recorded by lighthouse.
From [1]: "The first reason is that cumulative layout shift will become a ranking factor in May 2021."
> Your score shot back down to 72, you know have new areas to investigate, super cool !
I generally do not find it "super cool" when I suddenly/unexpectedly have new areas to investigate.
In most cases, the developer dealing with lighthouse scores is someone who just built a website to a client's spec, only to find out that there are things that it flags which are very time consuming to deal with. Set expectations all you want, but they want a near 100%.
To do all that work only for the score to drop later makes you as a developer look bad. A client who doesn't know any better will suspect you did faulty work.
When it completely rolls out during this month, it's going to be tie-breaker which, supposedly, happens a lot more often than people think.
Additionally, it's not the Lighthouse score that you need to worry about, but WebVitals (FID, LCP, CLS) and only that for Field data, if your main concern is SEO.
Lighthouse is just a general tool that can hint you at performance issues.
Your performance affects SEO, and people take the Performance Score as measured by Google Lighthouse to be a proxy for how Googlebot will rank their site.
If you're running Google Lighthouse manually, you might want to check out a tool I'm building - https://OnlineOrNot.com - it automatically monitors your page speed (as well as uptime, and soon Puppeteer checks). It uses Google Lighthouse v8.0.0 as of this morning (Australian time).
We have a free tier with no time limit or credit card required, if you want to check it out.
All of the reported URLs showing this issue no longer do, in the latest version of Lighthouse or on web.dev. Can you provide the URL (either here or in that issue) for which you still get this error? Thanks!
Not sure if it's just me, but the Lighthouse CLI is so buggy that I've resorted to setting to up to run in a docker container so that it doesn't crash when trying to load certain sites/configurations. Hope that they work on improving stability at some point. That being said, kudos to the team on the release, I'm sure this is a challenging project to work on!
Tried all of the proposed solutions and this error still pops up on certain sites and certain configuration settings. Felt totally random when it started happening.
Is there a way to run lighthouse 8.0.0 on older versions of Chrome for local (development) websites, so we can test them now instead of waiting until Chrome 93 is released?
In addition to the other comment, you could also install Chrome Canary to use the latest Lighthouse + Chrome.
If you don't have Canary installed, the CLI will use Chrome Stable. If Canary is present, that is the default. This can be configured with CHROME_PATH.
Readit News
Lighthouse is great though :)
It's super frustrating.
This is my current uBlock filter against it, I think it still works?
google.com#?#div:has( > div > div > h4:-abp-contains(People also))
Deleted Comment
Something that Lighthouse injects for testing tap-targets has inline styles, and Chrome will log a warning to the console, and Lighthouse penalizes you for that: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/issues/11862
Just 1 week after managing to claw our LightHouse score up to 90 - its shot back down 72. The arbitrary nature of their weighting is just tiring - and its compounded by the fact that noone actually knows how much this actually impacts SEO.
Lighthouse isn't there to improve your SEO. It's just a set of heuristics that make you website performance - as perceived by end users - measurable, and thus improvable. They add a quantitative score on a very qualitative process.
If you clawed your Lighthouse score to 90, you should have improved your end users experience, and that's what matters. Your score shot back down to 72, you know have new areas to investigate, super cool ! Your SEO will not suddenly improve or worsen due to this change. If you don't, however, address the new advices given by Lighthouse over a long period of time, other websites will, and their UX will be better than yours. And your SEO will reflect that. But that's the game with technology: over time, technology evolves, requirements change, and expectations shift.
From [1]: "The first reason is that cumulative layout shift will become a ranking factor in May 2021."
[1] https://huckabuy.com/2020/12/30/introduction-to-cumulative-l...
I generally do not find it "super cool" when I suddenly/unexpectedly have new areas to investigate.
In most cases, the developer dealing with lighthouse scores is someone who just built a website to a client's spec, only to find out that there are things that it flags which are very time consuming to deal with. Set expectations all you want, but they want a near 100%.
To do all that work only for the score to drop later makes you as a developer look bad. A client who doesn't know any better will suspect you did faulty work.
Additionally, it's not the Lighthouse score that you need to worry about, but WebVitals (FID, LCP, CLS) and only that for Field data, if your main concern is SEO.
Lighthouse is just a general tool that can hint you at performance issues.
Dead Comment
We have a free tier with no time limit or credit card required, if you want to check it out.
Background and foreground colors have a sufficient contrast ratio - Error!
axe-core Error: Cannot read property 'filter' of undefined
This website had ~80 in accessibility before.
Edit: this issue was known before release: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/issues/11384
Tried all of the proposed solutions and this error still pops up on certain sites and certain configuration settings. Felt totally random when it started happening.
If you don't have Canary installed, the CLI will use Chrome Stable. If Canary is present, that is the default. This can be configured with CHROME_PATH.