Get a perception of your website's performance.
PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse is a great way to measure the initial loading performance of your website, but it is a one time snapshot of a single page which you have to trigger manually every time. Furthermore, even though PageSpeed Insights tries to normalize the results, you will likely get different scores every time without any changes to the actual website. In addition, the scoring system itself is sometimes adjusted by the Lighthouse team, leaving you puzzled about what exactly changed - your website or the measurement method.
With frequent changes to the content of your website, the technical implementation, measurement methods and environment, having historical data which will show you how the performance is changing over time is crucial to be able to reason about the metrics and make prudent decisions about what to improve next. A dashboard showing all scores provided by Lighthouse, aggregated for different page types, simulated devices and averaged between multiple test runs will help you both save time collecting the metrics and provide vital insights into how the changes of your website are affecting the loading performance.
When installed and automated, Perfception will regularly trigger performance audits and collect performance measurements using the PageSpeed Insights API. The script will store the data in simple JSON files, which can be easily archived and imported into an analytics platform. Elasticsearch + Kibana is supported out of the box. You decide which pages of your website are checked and how often.
The project is currently in the prototype phase and might never leave it. You are welcome to fork it and play with it but it is only recommended to use it in production scenarios only if you know exactly what you are doing. The data format and the API will likely change in the upcoming releases. Furthermore, continuous maintenance and development of new features is not guaranteed in the long run.
Developers, Technical Leaders, Architects, Project Managers and Product Owners of public facing websites will benefit from the insights provided by Perfception. To install and configure it properly, intermediate knowledge of Linux and Bash is required. If you want to use Kibana Dashboards, which is the only way to view the data right now, except JSON, understanding of Elasticsearch and Kibana is mandatory.
- Install Perfception
- Create a Project and Collect the Reports
- Import the Reports into Elasticsearch
- View a Report with Lighthouse
Copyright 2021 Tim Navrotskyy and contributors
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.