Why your Lighthouse score changes when you did nothing
Introduction If you ship websites for a living, you have seen this. You change one thing on a page. You open Chrome, run Lighthouse, and the performance score goes up a few points. You take a screenshot. You tell the team the fix worked. Later the same day you run the same URL again. No new deploy. The score drops. Sometimes it drops below where you started. That is not you failing at your job.…
Your Lighthouse score fluctuates even when you make no changes to the code. The score is affected by various factors such as CPU load, network jitter, third-party tags, and even luck. It is essential to understand this variability to avoid misinterpreting score changes as improvements or regressions. This article offers a simple method to measure score swings and determine if a fix is truly worthwhile. By following these steps, you can separate real improvements from noise.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
