Use Lighthouse for performance budgets

Jun 14, 2019

Katie Hempenius

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Lighthouse now supports performance budgets. This feature, LightWallet, can be set up in under five minutes and provides feedback on the size and quantity of page resources.

Install Lighthouse #

LightWallet is available in the command line version of Lighthouse v5+.

To get started, install Lighthouse:

npm install -g lighthouse

Create a Budget #

Create a file named budget.json. In this file add the following JSON:

[
  {
    "resourceSizes": [
      {
        "resourceType": "script",
        "budget": 125
      },
      {
        "resourceType": "total",
        "budget": 300
      }
    ],
    "resourceCounts": [
      {
        "resourceType": "third-party",
        "budget": 10
      }
    ]
  }
]

This example budget.json file sets three separate budgets:

• A budget of 125 KB for the total amount of JavaScript on the page.
• A budget of 300 KB for the overall size of the page.
• A budget of 10 requests for the numer of requests made to third-party origins.

You can set budgets for any of the following resource types: document, font, image, media, other,script, stylesheet, third-party, and total.

Run Lighthouse #

Run Lighthouse using the --budget-path flag. This flag tells Lighthouse the location of your budget file.

lighthouse https://example.com --budget-path=./budget.json

View the Results #

If LightWallet has been configured correctly, the Lighthouse report will contain a Budgets section within the Performance category.

In the JSON version of the Lighthouse report, Lightwallet results can be found within the audit findings for the performance-budget audit.