[IMTDb]

Looks to me that you are not. using Lighthouse for the right reasons.

Lighthouse isn't there to improve your SEO. It's just a set of heuristics that make you website performance - as perceived by end users - measurable, and thus improvable. They add a quantitative score on a very qualitative process.

If you clawed your Lighthouse score to 90, you should have improved your end users experience, and that's what matters. Your score shot back down to 72, you know have new areas to investigate, super cool ! Your SEO will not suddenly improve or worsen due to this change. If you don't, however, address the new advices given by Lighthouse over a long period of time, other websites will, and their UX will be better than yours. And your SEO will reflect that. But that's the game with technology: over time, technology evolves, requirements change, and expectations shift.

[rhdunn]

Google's Web Vitals page tracks things like Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), First Contentful Paint (FCP), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). -- All of those metrics are visible in the Performance tab and are recorded by lighthouse.

From [1]: "The first reason is that cumulative layout shift will become a ranking factor in May 2021."

[1] https://huckabuy.com/2020/12/30/introduction-to-cumulative-l...

[eli]

But notably the SEO is based on those measurements as reported by actual Chrome users who choose to share data back to Google, which isn't necessarily the same as what lighthouse measures.

Also it hasn't happened yet. They pushed the implementation date to a slow rollout starting in "mid-June"

[katzgrau]

> Your score shot back down to 72, you know have new areas to investigate, super cool !

I generally do not find it "super cool" when I suddenly/unexpectedly have new areas to investigate.

In most cases, the developer dealing with lighthouse scores is someone who just built a website to a client's spec, only to find out that there are things that it flags which are very time consuming to deal with. Set expectations all you want, but they want a near 100%.

To do all that work only for the score to drop later makes you as a developer look bad. A client who doesn't know any better will suspect you did faulty work.

[dgb23]

Be proactive and inform your clients of the change. You get to do performance work, they feel taken care of by an expert, their visitors have a better experience, everyone wins!

[katzgrau]

> You get to do performance work, they feel taken care of by an expert, their visitors have a better experience, everyone wins!

Really though? It usually means:

* The fixes can require non-trivial changes that take an unknown amount of time to fix

* The client has to pay you for something that probably wasn't budgeted

* You have to fit in more work. If you're good at getting clients and you have a full schedule, it can throw a wrench in.

I'm not sure most freelance devs delight in doing suddenly imposed "performance work." Maybe the first time or two it's interesting, after that it's just annoying.

[topicseed]

All the publishers I know (being one myself) only care about CWV for SEO.

[sbarre]

Of course they do, but if that's the proxy metric that makes them care about usability and user experience, it's a win-win.

[topicseed]

Agreed! And it surfaces problems we as publishers don't particularly bump into on the say to day so definitely a win-win!

[pupppet]

Google needs to market Lighthouse to only developers. No good comes from your customers running these tests.