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Lighthouse audits, insights and estimated savings

An audit is one of the many automated checks Lighthouse runs on a page during a test: are the images larger than they need to be, does a script hold up the first content, does every image have a description? A check the page doesn’t pass appears in the report as a finding, often with an estimate of how much time or data fixing it could save.

Why it matters

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Findings connect a slow or shaky page with something concrete: a particular image, a stylesheet, a script from a plugin. That makes them the most practical part of the report.

They’re hints, not verdicts. A finding means the page didn’t meet the check’s criteria under the test conditions; it doesn’t mean the site is broken. The estimated savings are Lighthouse’s calculation for that one test, usually in milliseconds or kilobytes, and often tied to a single metric such as Largest Contentful Paint. Savings from different findings often overlap, so they don’t add up to a total.

In the Performance category, findings don’t change the score directly. The Performance score comes from the metrics alone; fixing a finding helps only if it improves one of them. In the Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO categories, the checks themselves make up the score.

Since Lighthouse 13, most performance checks are called insights. They replaced a set of older audits and are the same checks that Chrome’s developer tools show in their Performance panel.

What influences it

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Most performance findings on WordPress sites come from what the theme, page builder and plugins add to each page.

WordPress: Many plugins load their stylesheets and scripts on every page, even where they aren’t used. Page builders add extra layers of HTML around the content. Images are often uploaded at full camera size and shown much smaller.

Browser: Stylesheets and scripts in the head of the page hold up the first content until they’ve loaded. Fonts, embeds and tracking scripts from other servers add requests and work for the browser.

Server: A slow first response, redirects or uncompressed HTML show up as findings about the document request. Missing cache headers make returning visitors download files again.

CDN: Where files are served from, and with which cache lifetime and protocol, affects the findings about delivery.

In Permo

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Permo lists the findings of each test on its PageSpeed page, in the order Google reports them.

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