Automated Lighthouse Reporting with WebdriverIO

Lighthouse is a tool available in Chrome to provide insights into your web application covering areas such as performance and accessibility. But did you know that the score Lighthouse gives affects where your web application will appear in the results of a search engine? If your business is trying to sell or promote a product, you need the results of a search engine to be displaying your webpage on the first page, and ideally in the first few results, as users will rarely go beyond that.

It’s trivial to run an audit on any webpage, but typically this will be done on an ad-hoc basis, and will probably be limited to a single page load event. But what if you want to test a page behind authentication or test performance as part of a user journey? And do so reusing your existing automated tests?

Well, now you can.

Come to this talk to learn how you can leverage your existing WebdriverIO-based tests, and with minimal extra work generate lighthouse reports that cover user journeys, page navigations as well as page loads, in both mobile and desktop views.

To set the scene, we’ll cover reasons why a focus on improving your scores in the lighthouse audit matters, plus an overview of the type of information it provides. We will also cover some basic alternative ways to get the scores that Lighthouse provides if not using WebdriverIO

Join me in this talk to learn about the insights that Lighthouse can provide, how to include Lighthouse audits as part of your automated WebdriverIO tests, and how you can incorporate the audits in your CI/CD pipeline.