Announcing Lighthouse Support

Performance, Progressive Web App, Best Practice, and Accessibility Audits built right in to Calibre

It’s been almost two months since the release of Test Profiles and Budgets 2.0, and the response has been mind-blowing. 👏

I’m excited to announce the next major feature release:

Calibre is now the first tool to offer continuous Lighthouse reporting.

What is Lighthouse, anyway?

I’m glad you asked. Lighthouse is an Open Source project by the Google Chrome team that helps developers improve user experience through Progressive Web App, accessibility and best practice tests. 💅

In development since March 2016, Lighthouse has quickly grown into an absolutely indispensable suite. As of today, Lighthouse is available in three forms: a browser extension, an NPM package and also directly in Chrome Devtools.

Despite three methods of using Lighthouse, to do so continuously, we’d be left with a non-trivial task of writing custom scripts and deploying servers, rather than focusing on delivering better Web experiences to our customers.

It became clear that pairing Calibre with Lighthouse can offer an even more comprehensive landscape of performance, accessibility and offline capability.

🎩 Calibre Lighthouse

Lighthouse provides audits for four areas of focus: Performance, Progressive Web Apps, Best Practices and Accessbility.

Calibre brings those Lighthouse audit scores to the forefront as a familiar A-F grading system.

These audits provide actionable advice that will make apps faster, better to use and more accessible to a larger audience.

Calibre runs Lighthouse as part of every snapshot, which is great because:

• 🌐 It’s run from all Calibre Agent locations.
• 📱It’s configured using Test Profiles. Device and connection speeds will be emulated just like any other Calibre snapshot.
• 🔒It’s run using Authentication settings. You can audit logged in pages of your apps.

📊 Metrics

The introduction of Lighthouse also brings in a few new metrics:

• First Interactive & Consistently Interactive
• DOM Size (The number of DOM nodes)
• First Meaningful Paint & First Contentful Paint
• Lighthouse Performance, PWA, Best Practice and Accessbility audit scores (out of 100)

These user focused metrics are crucial to improving user experience, and like any other metric in Calibre, budgets can be set against them. 📈💥

🎉 Available today

Calibre Lighthouse is available for all account tiers, as of right now… actually, that’s a lie—we’ve been running Lighthouse for a little over a week now, so drop everything and go check your account as it’s already filled with data 😎

👏 A round of applause and heartfelt thank you

The Lighthouse Team: Brendan, Patrick, Eric, Ward and Paul have been intensely focused on shipping Lighthouse 2.0 in time for Google i/o, and have not wavered in their aid to make Calibre Lighthouse a reality.

I can’t thank them enough. 💙

Lighthouse is now also built into Chrome Devtools, audit your site during development, and monitor real world environments using Calibre. It’s a match made in heaven 👼

🙏 Supporting Calibre

If you too, think this release was ‘kind of a big deal’, and you want to help us continue building Calibre, please consider ✍️ signing up for a plan, ❤️ clicking up-vote on Medium, 🐦 tweeting or even shouting 🗣 “Calibre” to the sky. Your support is absolutely needed, valued, and appreciated.

We have so much more that we’re excited to share with you as we continue our mission to make the Web fast for everyone. 🌍🌏🌎

Ben Schwarz

Ben is the founder and CEO of Calibre. He regularly speaks at conferences worldwide and has been involved in far-reaching Open Source projects as well as web standards. Find him on Twitter or LinkedIn.