Google Lighthouse 13 Brings Insight Based Audits

Google Lighthouse 13 is now available. The old long list of performance audits is now broken down into clear insights that work with Chrome DevTools. Your score for performance stays the same.

What Changed in Lighthouse 13

Instead of a lot of separate audits, Lighthouse now shows insight based diagnostics. This makes the report and Chrome DevTools show the same information to teams.

Here are some examples of the new things you’ll learn:

1. CLS culprits to find out what causes layout shifts
2. Document latency to include redirects, server time, and compression all at once
3. Block CSS and JS from rendering to block surfaces
4. Third parties to show how external scripts affect things
5. LCP insights to help you figure out how to get to your biggest paint job

These take the place of several older audits and make reports less noisy.

Audits That were Removed

Some older checks were completely removed because they don’t add much value anymore. The new insights model includes First Meaningful Paint and a set of legacy diagnostics as some of its best features.

Rollout and Availability

You can now use npm and Chrome Canary to run Lighthouse 13. In about a week, it will be available in PageSpeed Insights and in Chrome stable with Chrome 143.

Why this matters for SEO and development teams

• Cleaner report with information about the root cause so that fixes are easier to rank
• The same advice is given in Lighthouse, DevTools, and PageSpeed Insights.
• There won’t be any unexpected score changes because v13 doesn’t change how performance is scored.

Quick action plan

1. 1. Use Lighthouse 13 to check important templates and make a baseline report.
   2. Change the names of the internal checklists to match the new insights and get rid of any audits that are no longer useful.
   3. First, take care of the things that have the most effect:

a). Use CLS culprits to keep images, ads, or fonts from moving around in the layout.

b).Use LCP insights to make the load path for the biggest element better.

c).Use insights from Render blocking and Third parties to speed up the main thread and the network.