Lighthouse overview
Google positions Lighthouse around performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO audits.
Performance Audit
Faultry vs Google Lighthouse
Lighthouse is strong at performance, accessibility, and best-practices scoring. Faultry picks up the live-site blockers Lighthouse leaves scattered across other tools: discoverability, trust, previews, mobile friction, and runtime failures.
| Category | Lighthouse | Faultry |
|---|---|---|
| Performance / Core Web Vitals | Full Lighthouse scoring for performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. | PageSpeed/Lighthouse lab audit with separate CrUX context when available. Optimization opportunities stay visible, but speed is not the whole story. |
| Security / trust signals | Basic best-practice warnings, but not a trust-focused audit. | Security headers, transport trust, and DNS-layer checks in one report. |
| Mobile viewport behavior | Responsive hints and score impact, not a live usability pass. | Live Chromium render at 375x667 with overflow and tap-target checks. |
| Social preview validation | Outside the main workflow. | Full OG + Twitter Card validation with tag-based preview simulation. |
| AI discoverability | No crawler-access or llms-specific diagnosis. | Crawler access, llms.txt quality (emerging convention), and cloaking checks. |
| Console reliability | Not built around client-side runtime triage. | Initial page-load findings categorized by type + severity. |
| Output style | Scores and audit opportunities. | Letter grade, evidence, and fix-first framing for discoverability, trust, and conversion blockers. |
When to use Lighthouse
- › Use Lighthouse when you want fast performance, accessibility, and best-practices scoring inside dev workflows or CI.
- › It is still the cleaner choice when an engineer needs to debug render-blocking resources, accessibility regressions, or PWA-related issues.
- › If the question is “why did the score move?”, Lighthouse is the right starting point.
When Faultry fits better
- › Use Faultry when the page may be technically live but still harder to discover, trust, or convert than it should be.
- › It is better when the problem spans crawl hints, preview quality, mobile friction, trust signals, and initial page-load failures rather than one raw performance score.
- › The report stays grounded in the live URL, which is usually what founders need before they open six separate tools.
Source-backed reading
PageSpeed Insights documentation
PageSpeed remains the shared performance baseline beneath a large part of the current web-audit ecosystem.
Questions people ask before switching
Is Faultry a Lighthouse replacement?
Not really. Lighthouse is still better for deep performance and accessibility scoring. Faultry is the better complement when the bigger problem is that the site feels invisible, rough, or untrustworthy despite an acceptable score.
Why compare them at all if both mention SEO?
Because they answer different SEO-adjacent questions. Lighthouse gives lightweight page-quality signals. Faultry focuses on the live-site blockers that suppress visibility and trust after the page ships.
Run the live-page check before you buy another stack
Faultry is useful when the practical question is not “which suite has more tabs?” but “what on this page is hurting discoverability, trust, or conversions right now?”
Run a Free Visibility Audit