Google Lighthouse in your automation suite?

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Has anyone implemented Google’s Lighthouse or similar (e.g. sitespeed.io) into their automation suite?

Have you got any pros or cons that others should be aware of if they’re trying something similar?

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I haven’t used it yet, looking forward to seeing people’s comments. It looks very neat and I might try it out later! :slight_smile:

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Hey! I have tried to implement Lighthouse but had an issue.

The system I work on throws a popup almost everytime you load it (for authentication) and I cant get the lighthouse report to go past this popup.

So the only advice I can give so far is if your system has similar behavior you might struggle.

Jack

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Funnily enough, I’ve just started adding Lighthouse audits to our automated suite this week!

@jacktaylortester are you using basic authentication? I had the same issue in my testing and found you can use this command in the CLI to run the reports that way
[lighthouse https://username:password@example.domain.com].

I’ve been using Cypress too and found you can extract data from each report if you download each as a HTML file - still a work in progress but it can be done!

Lighthouse CLI

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My observations based on two experiences:

  • Lighthous can be found in DevTools in Chrome.
  • There are some default options before generating a report.
  • Lighthouse gives a brief overview of quality attributes, the main points to be improved, and passed audits.
  • There are several ways to export the test report like HTML.
  • For a blog owner there is a lot of technical feedback to digest.
    Using a CMS or Content Management System I do not know what to do with this feedback. In many cases it is difficult to map this to actionable steps. Also web site plugins might have a negative impact. I am wondering whether a security plugin is blocking certain actions and decreasing the scores in certain areas.
  • In some cases Accessibility is focused how it is done and not whether it is useful. E.g. the alternative text of an image is “image”. This is good enough for Lighthouse. But this is not descriptive for a user using a screen reader. The same can be applied for the link “here”. Which page is “here” referring to?
  • ARIA is advised to increase the accessibility. According to me HTML is better than ARIA in a lot of cases. In other words ARIA should be used, when HTML cannot provide enough information to disabled users.
  • There is no overall score for Progressive Web App.
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On Thursday March 11th Crystal Preston-Weston will give a presentation about Integrating accessibility into the testing process. Due to time zone differences I only had a look at her presentation.

On one of the slides she mentions the following blog post:

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We’ve started playing with lighthouse and are looking to implement it in our CI suite. It’s already found some client side performance test issues and given us a backlog of accessibility issues to focus on fixing.

Still need to work on exactly how we integrate it, but it’s a work in progress

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Interested to hear how you get on with this @sjprior :grin: