Southern New Hampshire University

Google Lighthouse

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NOTE: This is for Google Chrome ONLY. Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. You can run it against any web page, public or requiring authentication. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO and more. 

Go to The Page You Want to Test

Right-click on the page

From the drop-down menu select "Inspect"

Right-click drop-down menu with "inspect" boxed.

You will want to select "Lighthouse." You may need to select the double arrows in the top bar to find "Lighthouse."

Inspect menu with the right double arrow button selected and the "Lighthouse" button boxed.
  • Select what you would like to test.
  • Once you have them selected, select "Generate Report."
  • It would be a best practice to select only "accessibility" and "best practices" and then run both the "mobile" and "desktop" device. For this purpose, we suggest running it twice.
Lighthouse homepage with some options selected from the menu and the "Generate report" button boxed.
  • Once completed, it will give a percentage score out of 100.
  • You can go through the testing site to find more information about what did not pass the automatic checker.
Test results of the lighthouse.

Note: you may see a warning at the top telling you that there were issues affecting this lighthouse run, even if you use an incognito window. This is ok, but please be aware of possible false positives.

Understanding the Results of Test

Issues Grouped by Type

Lists the issues that failed the automated checks. You can expand the accordion by selecting the Carat on the right to see more details, including the failing elements.

Issues that were found in the scan.

Items to Manually Check with Lighthouse

Lighthouse will provide you with a list of items to check manually. I am finding it lower on the results page.

The additional items to manually check.

Information on how to test them if you expand the carat on the right.

Manually testing and how to tab order dropdown opened.

Passed Audits

  • This section is for your reference about items that have passed! You do not have to do anything with this information.
  • The information could be used to update roadmaps and others on progress.
List of the passed checks.

Not Applicable

The number of automated checks that appear not to apply to the scan.

List of the not applicable checks.

Runtime Settings

Runtime information could be helpful when vendors or others are trying to trouble shoot any issues.

The runtime report of the scan.

Helpful Resources

More information about accessibility and barriers encountered.

To learn about data privacy.

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