Spent way too long chasing a perfect 100 on Lighthouse for a client site, got there eventually, felt pretty good about it. Then real user monitoring data came in and actual load times on mid-range Android devices were still rough. Lab data and field data just weren’t telling the same story.
Switched to pulling actual Core Web Vitals from CrUX/field data instead of obsessing over the lab score, and started testing on throttled connections and older devices instead of my dev machine on fiber. Found a bunch of real-world jank that Lighthouse never flagged, mostly around hydration delays on a React setup.
Not saying Lighthouse is useless, it’s a decent baseline, just learned the hard way it’s not the same as knowing how the site actually performs for real users on real hardware.
Anyone else run into that gap between lab scores and field data? Curious what tools people are actually relying on day to day at this point, feels like the landscape shifts every year.
