Lighthouse Audits

Paid plans

Overview

Lighthouse is Google's open-source auditing tool. Pingniner can run it against your site monitors on a schedule and keep the history, so you can see whether your site is getting faster or slower over time.

It scores four categories out of 100:

Category	Measures
Performance	How fast the page loads and becomes usable
Accessibility	Whether the page works for users with assistive technology
Best Practices	Security, modern standards, console errors
SEO	Whether search engines can crawl and understand the page

INFO

Lighthouse audits are available on paid plans. On the free plan the toggle is disabled. See Plans & Limits.

Enabling Lighthouse

On a site monitor, in the create or Settings form:

1. Turn on Lighthouse Check.
2. Choose a Lighthouse Schedule:
   • Weekly
   • Monthly
   • Leave it empty for manual only
3. Save.

Running an audit manually

Open the site, go to its Lighthouse tab and click Run Lighthouse Check. This works whether or not a schedule is set — useful for checking the effect of a change immediately rather than waiting for the next scheduled run.

Reading the results

The Lighthouse tab lists every audit with:

• Run At — when it ran
• Strategy — the simulated device profile
• Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO scores

Three widgets sit above the table:

• Overview — the most recent scores
• Scores chart — all four categories over time
• Vitals chart — Core Web Vitals over time

Score bands

Google's own thresholds:

Score	Rating
90–100	Good
50–89	Needs improvement
0–49	Poor

Core Web Vitals

The metrics Google uses in search ranking:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — how long until the main content appears. Good is under 2.5s.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — how much the page jumps around while loading. Good is under 0.1.
• INP / FID — how quickly the page responds to interaction.

TIP

Watch the trend, not the number. Lighthouse scores vary between runs on identical pages — network conditions and machine load both affect them. A drop from 94 to 91 is noise. A slide from 94 to 71 over a month is a regression worth investigating.

What Lighthouse does not tell you

• Real user experience. Lighthouse is a lab test from one location on a simulated device. Actual users are on different networks and hardware.
• Whether the site is up. That is what the site monitor's uptime checks are for. A site can score 100 and be down an hour later.
• Accessibility compliance. The accessibility score catches automatically detectable problems only, which is a minority of the issues real users hit. A score of 100 is not a claim of conformance.

Best Practices

• Enable it on your most important pages — the homepage and whichever page drives your revenue. Auditing every site is rarely worth the noise.
• Use a monthly schedule unless you deploy front-end changes constantly. Weekly on a stable site is mostly measurement variance.
• Run manually after a redesign to catch a regression before your users do.
• Fix accessibility findings first. They are usually the cheapest to fix and the ones with a real person on the other end.