Tracking your site’s performance is crucial. It can help you identify weak areas and take the necessary steps to improve them. However, you might feel torn between two popular performance-monitoring tools: PageSpeed Insights vs Lighthouse.
Fortunately, we’ve put together a guide to help you make a decision. By looking at how these two tools fare in different areas, you should be able to select the one that best meets your needs.
Overall, the tools share a lot of similarities. It’s because PageSpeed Insights’ performance testing engine is based on Lighthouse.
However, there are also some key differences between the tools and each gives you access to different information, despite the performance part being based on the same engine.
In short, PageSpeed Insights presents the Lighthouse data in a different way. It also gives you access to data beyond the Lighthouse analysis, such as real user data from the Chrome User Experience Report. At the same time, Lighthouse also presents some data that PageSpeed Insights doesn’t include, such as reports on SEO and accessibility.
👉 In this post, we’ll compare PageSpeed Insights vs Lighthouse across three key features. We’ll also share some tips to help you choose the right tool for your website. Let’s get started!
📚 Table of contents:
- How do you run a test? Ease of use
- Where does the data come from?
- What reports and metrics can you access?
PageSpeed Insights vs Lighthouse: Three key features compared
Before we start, 🏁 it’s worth mentioning that both PageSpeed Insights (PSI) and Lighthouse are available for free.
Lighthouse is an open-source auditing tool created by Google that comes built into Chrome and most other Chromium-based browsers. PageSpeed Insights is also a Google tool and can be accessed on any browser.
Let’s take a closer look at 🔎 these two online tools and how they compare in different areas:
1. How do you run a test? Ease of use
If you plan to run regular speed tests, you’ll want a user-friendly tool ⚙️ with an intuitive interface. In this section, we’ll compare PageSpeed Insights vs Lighthouse for ease of use:
PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is relatively easy to use. To get started, simply enter your URL into the box and hit Analyze:
It will then generate two reports: one for your desktop site and one for the mobile version. You can click on either tab to view your performance on these devices:
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This article was written by John Hughes and originally published on ThemeIsle Blog.