Speedlify

I'm at the point in my career where I feel pretty comfortable building, testing, and deploying (simple) websites; so the next step, in my mind, is implementing some form of automated benchmarking: I want to make sure that I'm building Good Websites, but I don't want to have to go back and manually check all the time.

One of the most popular tools for measuring whether your Website is Good is Google's Lighthouse, which gives your site 4 scores out of 100 on Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO—if you're reading my blog, you've probably heard of it before. The simplest way to run Lighthouse is to navigate to your web page in Chrome and run Lighthouse from Chrome DevTools, but Lighthouse is also available on the command line or as part of a Node application if you're looking to automate testing. Which I am.

But rather than building your own tool (or maybe, alongside building your own tool), the easiest way to continuously test your Lighthouse scores might be to use Speedlify, made by Zach Leatherman at Netlify. It's a simple 11ty application that you fork and deploy to Netlify. Each time it builds, it gets your latest Lighthouse scores and displays them on the application, persisting your historical scores in Netlify's build cache. It's even got a neat speedlify-score web component for displaying your score elsewhere (like in the footer of your website, like Zach does). It's a simple, brilliant tool to use as an introduction to more robust automated performance-testing products.

Check out my latest Lighthouse scores here. As of mid-2022, they need a little work.

Speedlify, Zach Leatherman