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))
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.
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.
