This is a frustrating, but unfortunately common situation. Fortunately, there is a version of Google Lighthouse that allows for on-demand audits. Advertising Continue Banner Design reading below It is called Lighthouse CI. How to Run Automated Lighthouse Audits on WordPress Changes CI stands for Continuous Integration, which is a common practice in software development where changes from different developers are merged into a central code base (repository). An interesting aspect of CI is that you can run automated checks when changes are merged. This is a great place to perform automated SEO page speed and QA (quality assurance). In the Banner Design screenshot above, I set a lighthouse performance budget and when I merged a change into the codebase, Lighthouse CI ran automatically and detected that the change would reduce performance of speed.
Advertising Continue reading below This quality control failure could actually prevent the change from being deployed to production. Really Banner Design cool. Right? I've put together a website using a modern stack, the JAMstack, which supports CI out of the box. However, taking advantage of this requires completely switching platforms if you are using WordPress or similar. In this article, you'll learn how to accomplish the same thing, but with a traditional website. Specifically, we'll be using old WordPress, the most popular CMS on the Banner Design planet. Here is our technical plan: We will create a GitHub repository to track WordPress changes. We will install a Lighthouse CI action to check for modified URLs. We'll create a Google Cloud function that runs on WordPress updates and does the following: Gets most recently modified URLs from Banner Design XML sitemaps. Updates the Lighthouse CI action configuration to verify these URLs. Commit our updated configuration to the GitHub repository. We'll create and add a headlight performance budget to track when changes are hurting performance.
We'll look at the resources to learn more. Create a GitHub repository When your site is built using JAMstack technologies, you need a source control repository for website code and content. In our case, the WordPress content resides in a database, so Banner Design we will only use the repository to configure Lighthouse and track changes. One of the most valuable features of source control repositories is that all your changes are versioned. If your code stops working after new changes, you can always roll back to previous versions. GitHub is the most popular option and the one we'll be using here. How to Run Automated Lighthouse Audits on WordPress Banner Design Changes Once you've created a repository, you'll need to update it remotely from your local machine or scripts. Advertising Continue reading below You can do this using the git command line tool . Install it on your computer if you don't have it. As we will be updating the repository, we need to obtain an authentication token.