Why is PageSpeed Insights worse than my local Lighthouse score?
You run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools on a client URL and see Performance 94. You paste the same URL into PageSpeed Insights and the lab Performance score drops to the sixties. The audits look related. The numbers do not. Neither result is “lying.” They ran the same Lighthouse family of audits on different machines, with different throttling behaviour, and often with different cache and extension…
When you run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools on a client's URL and see a Performance score of 94, but then paste the same URL into PageSpeed Insights and see the lab Performance score drop to the sixties, it may seem frustrating. The audits look related, but the numbers do not match. This inconsistency arises because Lighthouse runs on different machines, with different throttling behaviour, cache, and extension states.
PageSpeed Insights lab data is often worse than a local Lighthouse run, and it's essential to compare fairly and understand the reasons behind the differences.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
