Site Administration

Analyze Drupal Site Performance with Lighthouse for Drupal 8, 9, and 10

Lighthouse is an open source, automated tool for analyzing your site's performance. Lighthouse is built-in to the Google Chrome browser. When auditing a page, Lighthouse runs various tests against the page and then reports how well the page did across a broad spectrum of metrics. While Lighthouse doesn't improve the performance of a Drupal site itself, it helps to establish a performance profile and point towards areas that could be improved.

Lighthouse requires the use of Google Chrome. Other browsers include their own performance auditing tools. While the exact usage of each tool varies, the end result is the same: a report that can be interpreted to suggest where to focus your performance-tuning efforts.

In this tutorial, we'll:

  • Learn how to run Lighthouse tests against a Drupal site
  • Interpret the results of the report generated by Lighthouse
  • Provide guidance on next steps to take to address the performance issues Lighthouse finds in our Drupal site

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to use Lighthouse to profile a Drupal site, interpret the results, and know where to start on making improvements.