How can you use Chrome Lighthouse to evaluate website's security?

Chrome’s Lighthouse is a powerful auditing tool used by developers to assess the performance of their websites based on specified scores. This tool gives insights into the website’s overall performance and how it can be improved. Optimizing their website directly affects some of its significant aspects, such as:

• Rendering speed

• Loading speed

• Website’s discoverability

• Resource usage

• Code quality and maintainability

In this Answer, we'll be looking at how Lighthouse works and how we can use it to evaluate a website's security.

How does Lighthouse function?

Chrome's Lighthouse tool audits the URL of a web app and runs checks to provide best practices and feedback on errors, below-standard codes, and ways to fix them. The way Chrome’s Lighthouse assesses the website is on these categories:

Performance

Within this category, Lighthouse depends on different factors such as the First Contentful Paint (FCP)Time for the first content to render , Speed Indexmetric to measure how long the content takes to be visible to the user, Largest Contentful Paint (LFP)Time taken for the largest content element to be visible, Total Blocking Time (TBT)Total duration of unresponsiveness of a web page to user input, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Total amount of unexpected movement and visual instability of webpage elements during the loading process This gives a score depending on the overall loading speed of the website and the different types of content (text and images).

Accessibility

For this category of metrics, Lighthouse measures and gives a score by comparing the web content to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). This, in turn, evaluates the website against a set standard. However, it won't guarantee that the content is following the guideline accurately.

Best practices

When Lighthouse evaluates a website, it verifies that the coding practices yield the best possible optimization. It checks for the correct use of CSS, Javascript, and HTML semantics, thus ensuring that the website meets industry standards. Lighthouse might provide the developer with code improvements against the set standards in this assessment.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In this audit, Lighthouse determines if search engines can crawl the website in review and then suggests some valuable improvements. The enhancements can help increase the website interactions with users as a higher level of traffic surges towards the website with ease.

Evaluating a website’s security

Chrome’s Lighthouse does not directly evaluate a website’s overall security. However, through the report it generates, developers can assess the issues which can cause a security breach and fix them. Some of the methods are listed below:

• There is a possibility that the report generated highlights security vulnerabilities when the website's content is served over HTTPS, while a part of it is served on HTTP. This can cause security breaches as these parts are more vulnerable to potential attacks.

• Lighthouse indicates some of the security headers and their misconfigurations, which can cause security risks. The notable security headers which help mitigate most of the vulnerabilities are Content-Security-Policy (CSP), HTTP Strict-Transport-Security Header (HSTS), X-Content-Type-Options, X-Frame-Options, and many more. These headers can irradicate attacks such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), man-in-the-middle (MITM) SSL attacks, and Click-jacking attacks.

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Conclusion

Chrome’s Lighthouse is a website auditing tool that assists developers in grading their website on a specified metric. It also suggests the possible improvements they can make to their website. These suggestions can lead to the betterment of the SEO and overall performance, and even make the website more secure.