September 11, 2024

Non-perfect Lighthouse scores

Should you care about a non-perfect Google Lighthouse score? In my opinion a good website should have a perfect or near-perfect score. It is a sign of good code.

As argued before, there are multiple reasons to aim for a lightning fast website. It gives you a better ranking, improved conversion and a better UX.

Surely, you can cheat to get to this perfect score, especially as long as you are not in the Chrome User Experience (CrUX) Report. But as soon as your website becomes more important, your Real User Monitoring results will count and cheating will become much harder.

According to other sources, like the Chrome Developers website, you should NOT care about a perfect score. They say: ‘To provide a good user experience, sites should strive to have a good score (90-100). A “perfect” score of 100 is extremely challenging to achieve and not expected. For example, taking a score from 99 to 100 needs about the same amount of metric improvement that would take a 90 to 94.’

A “perfect” score of 100 is extremely challenging to achieve and not expected

I would say that extremely challenging is just an opinion. Just make sure you are not that person who has a static website, but then loads 2.5Mb of Javascript and complains about a poor score. Loading that amount of Javascript GUARANTEES a poor score. I think that if you stick to best practices, you will get a perfect Google Lighthouse score without much effort.

Finally, fast websites are not just more pleasant to use, but they are also better for this planet. So, if you are not doing for something else, do it for the environment.

So, should you care about a non-perfect Lighthouse score? I do think so.

()  Joost van der Schee