Lighthouse Stopped Working on Joomla Sites?! Topic is solved

[LTCreations01]

Since this is a performance category, let me first state that anybody having speed issues with J4 needs to look at how they created the site - not Joomla 4.
I've created a lot of J4 installations in the last year and every one of them is screaming fast - 97% to 100% mobile page speed.

That said, I've always used Lighthouse to test any site. I stream weekly meetings about SEO and Web development, and when asked, I show people my several of the sites I've created in J4 to show the page speed - for mobile devices. All of them get mid to high 90's if you make sure you know what you are doing: properly size the images; don't use gigantic images; and compress images.

But what I would like to know is, what happened to Lighthouse today?!
All day I've been trying to find out why "only" Joomla sites are no longer able to be tested in Incognito / Lighthouse. I've been doing this a long time and never had any problems. I always get high scores for Joomla sites.

Today, however, "EVERY" Joomla 4 site that I've tested, 6 of my own or my clients, which are all on A2Hosting.com
So, you might think it was my computer or browser. I had a friend do the same tests and he got the same response from Lighthouse - he's in Florida and I'm in Washington State.
Then I tested a site in Netherlands - https://db8.nl/nl/ - which was a random site that I knew is a Joomla installation.

That site has the same issue!
Here is the error:

Speed Index
Error!
Chrome didn't collect any screenshots during the page load. Please make sure there is content visible on the page, and then try re-running Lighthouse. (NO_SCREENSHOTS)

It doesn't matter where the Joomla site is hosted, not even the country. Lighthouse just stopped working for Joomla sites.

Has anybody had / seen this issue?
The proper way to run a Lighthouse performance test is to open "Incognito" from Chrome, right click and select "Inspect", assure that "Mobile" is selected, then hit the blue button "Analyze Page Load".

If you get it to work, let me know. I've tried everything I can think and nothing works. I have seen some of the details which states that the Google Tag Manger is causing a problem. But I can't run down more specifics.

Also, if you use PageSpeedInsights that works. But Lighthouse is usually more dependable and accurate.

This is something that, I think, Google has done (although not purposely...let's hope), but it's only interrupting Joomla sites. So I'm hoping Joomla developers will take a look to see what could possibly single out Joomla. Drupal works. WordPress works. What the heck?!

[pe7er]

But what I would like to know is, what happened to Lighthouse today?!
All day I've been trying to find out why "only" Joomla sites are no longer able to be tested in Incognito / Lighthouse. I've been doing this a long time and never had any problems. I always get high scores for Joomla sites.

Today, however, "EVERY" Joomla 4 site that I've tested, 6 of my own or my clients, which are all on A2Hosting.com
So, you might think it was my computer or browser. I had a friend do the same tests and he got the same response from Lighthouse - he's in Florida and I'm in Washington State.
Then I tested a site in Netherlands - https://db8.nl/nl/ - which was a random site that I knew is a Joomla installation.

That site has the same issue!

Hey, that's my site :-)

I tried to reproduce your issue and tested my site with Google Lighthouse.
However I cannot reproduce your issue.
In my browser (Chrome Version 117.0.5938.62) it works ok:

Screenshot from 2023-10-18 01-08-11.png

It might be an issue with your browser on your computer.

Have you updated all your software (Operating system + Google Chrome)?
Have you rebooted your computer and tried again?
Could you test it with another computer?

[gsmela]

Lighthouse is working fine with my eight J4 sites.

[LTCreations01]

pe7er - I hope I did not offend you in any way! I was only hoping that someone on the other side of the world from me wouldn't mind that I tested their site and it failed.

Which also proves to me that it's something within the U.S.
You performed the test perfectly.
EVERY Joomla site that I tested today failed. But every WordPress, Drupal or anything else is fine.

I know it's not just in my area because I had someone from Florida test and he got the same errors.

The fact that you performed the test and it worked tells me that there is "something" within the U.S. that's not working properly. I have no idea where to look, but I did post this issue in GitHub about Lighthouse to see if someone may have an answer.

Thank you for responding that you were able to perform the test. I'll update the GitHub post to state that.

And, again, I hope you didn't mind that I used your site as a guinea pig - test subject.

Oh, and nice score!
That's what "I" have been used to seeing. So you can imagine my surprise when I get nothing but an error. I suppose by tomorrow this will all be history...

[LTCreations01]

gsmela - where are you?

We ran tests in both corners of the U.S. with the same results. Are you in the U.S.?

[gsmela]

LTCreations01 I’m in the Northeast United States. My servers are in Georgia and Texas.

[LTCreations01]

Even though I'm in the Northwest, my server is in Chicago. So this is really odd that you have no problem in the southern states.
I have absolutely no issues with my server. But it would seem they are the culprit when I see you have no issues. But my friend in Florida has the same issue and he doesn't use the same hosting server.

My guess? It's a pipe issue - one of the companies that supplies the pipe to the hosting companies.

Thank you both for your responses.
It still makes no sense that only Joomla sites are effected. But...stranger things have happened.

[pe7er]

pe7er - I hope I did not offend you in any way! I was only hoping that someone on the other side of the world from me wouldn't mind that I tested their site and it failed.

No, don't worry. No problem!

Which also proves to me that it's something within the U.S.
You performed the test perfectly.
EVERY Joomla site that I tested today failed. But every WordPress, Drupal or anything else is fine.

I know it's not just in my area because I had someone from Florida test and he got the same errors.

It seems weird that Lighthouse tests on other CMS systems seem to work well for you, but on Joomla sites not.

I just tested again with a VPN connected to the USA (however I cannot select a state) and it still works ok.
Maybe you could test it with a VPN connected to another country?

[LTCreations01]

The response from "gsmela" showed that he has no problem.
So I did a little research to find that the U.S. has some serious Internet issues, mostly on the east coast. I'm on the west coast, but my server is in Chicago close to "gsmela" who has no problems.

My friend in Florida is not hosted where I am and got the same issues.
I then thought it was my server, so I tested my site, failed, and 2 WordPress sites that I know are on my same server - success with them.

I'm hoping that someone in GitHub can shed some light. This just makes no sense at all.

[flange0]

Iam in scotland and i have the same problem?

[nacc]

Lighthouse reporting seems to be working for me. Tested half dozen [known] J! websites today. Took a few attempts to get a report in a couple of instances.

Admittedly only tested with Google Chrome v109.0.5414.168; cannot say what other versions of Chrome may do. It's not something I normally do.

[LTCreations01]

Iam in scotland and i have the same problem?

REALLY?! I was beginning to think I'm nearing my "end"!

Thank you for speaking up and letting me know I'm not crazy. I don't know what it is, but today, Lighthouse "and" PageSpeedInsights are showing data from weeks ago in one of the WordPress site on which I'm working to get the pages fast.
I keep hitting 95 for mobile, and then the next day it drops back to 65.
I've been trying to figure it out, and today I looked at the images that Lighthouse was reviewing. They are images I removed 2 weeks ago!

So this issue is getting deeper. I'm wondering why they haven't figured out that there is this problem.

[Richard67]

I have observed the issue described in the initial post, too, on my Joomla site. It might be that Lighthouse or Chrome have introduced a bug with their last update, because when I run Lighthouse not in the developer tools but on the command line, it works.

For this I have installed Google Chrome on my Linux development environment where I have npm available, because it needs a Chrome executable.

Then I have installed the Lighthouse npom package with command "npm install -g lighthouse" in a previously empty folder.

Then I have run command "lighthouse XXX -GA", with "XXX" being the URL of the page to be tested, e.g. https://www.richard-fath.de/de/ .

Then I went to https://googlechrome.github.io/lighthouse/viewer/ in a browser and have uploaded the generated file "latest-run/lhr.report.json" using the "select a file" link (drag and drop doesn't work).

The result was a valid performance index.

As the Lighthouse version from npm is newer than the one in the developer tools in Chrome, there is some hope that it is a bug in Lighthouse which will be fixed when that newer version is rolled out with the next Chrome update.

[smint]

I´m in Germany and experienced the same issue - all my Joomla 4.4.0 and 5.0 sites give the mentioned error in pagespeed.
All others that are not updated to J4.4.0 work fine.
No idea what this is...

[Richard67]

Hmm, now the problem also happens with the method I've described in my previous comment ... for URLs where it has worked just an hour before. Weird.

[nacc]

Does this have anything to do with Joomla? Is this a Joomla bug?

[LTCreations01]

I did some "deep" investigation yesterday with both PageSpeedInsights as well as Lighthouse. Both of them are "knackered"!

I think Joomla is effected with Lighthouse issues because there is code that is different in Joomla. However, I do not believe any of this is the "fault" of Joomla.
I have had both the latest update of Joomla effected "and" previous versions that I haven't updated yet. There is a new version, 4.4.0, and I'm running 4.3.4 on most of my Joomla sites because I ran into this issue before the updates were released for my sites. I tested both versions and got the same results - the error and no performance results.

I updated 1 of my Joomla projects just to see if there was anything different. Nothing to do with the latest update.

I firmly believe this is an issue with both Lighthouse and PageSpeedInsights and here is why.

When I tested a WordPress project yesterday and got horrible results (65), I drilled down to the specific problems that Lighthouse found.
The test ran, but I know for a fact that the page speed indicated was absolutely wrong!

I checked the first image that Lighthouse indicated was slowing the load time by 7 seconds.
More than a week ago, I went through all the images on the home page to resize the images (previous developer did not), compress and change them to webp.
Immediately after I completed changing all the images and enabling LiteSpeed cache, I ran a test. I got a 97 for mobile. I was happy with that.

The next day I tested again and got 65. So I disabled LiteSpeed cache and anything possible that "could" cache, including going into the cPanel and disabling all cache.

When I ran the tests in both Lighthouse and PageSpeedInsights, both platforms indicated the same problems, but both platforms - are you ready for this?
Both of them found the "previous" images that I had removed / replaced. The page, more than a week ago, had more than 10MB of images on the home page. I reduced that to a total of just over 800KB.
I also changed the format of the images to webp.
I also cleared the cache and everything from chrome / incognito so there was no cache in the server, none in the browser, and I expected to see speed results in the 70's at least (since the cache was disabled) with the home page reduced to that 800KB.

Remember, before I ran those tests I removed - not just disabled - "all" cache! There is nothing possible that could be in the server, browser or the site for cache - especially from more than a week ago.

But both platforms "somehow" found the old images, as if both platforms were using cached information for the test!
I have no idea why, but I know for a fact that what Lighthouse and PageSpeedInsights are showing as results are the results from the site which are nearly 2 weeks old!

I went far enough to check with Firefox, Chrome and Incognito. Firefox "clearly" indicated that the images in the home page "are" the current images. I looked at the source code. I looked at the "inspect" code (pretty much the same just drilling down) and clearly, all the images that are in the page of the site are the updated images. And, there was 0 cache capable of being generated with the server or the site.

Yet, both Lighthouse and PageSpeedInsights indicate that they are the "old" images from almost 2 weeks ago!

As I'm considering all of this while I write, I think Joomla has code that is forcing Lighthouse and PageSpeedInsights to render the "new" / "current" information on the pages of a Web site, and that's why when we run Joomla we get that error - because Lighthouse and PageSpeedInsights CANNOT render the current information!
I can't confirm that, but it's the most logical assumption.
And those who don't get the error are seeing "old" - somehow - cached data. Check and see if that's true.

I think that some can get those speed test to run without errors, but they are - somehow - being shown "old" data results.

At this point, the only thing I can confirm is that this is NOT a problem with Joomla. I'm on the side of Joomla trying to tell the speed test sites that they need to use current information, but they can't. So they throw the error.

If "all" of you who have responded, especially those who are saying they "can" run the tests, take a very close look at the images, or something in the page you test, to see if the test page is showing you "current" information or old, then we can all breathe a little easier.
Do something like change an image or something obvious so you can see if that test is actually performing a test on "current" page data, or if it's showing you "previous" test results - NOT current test results.

Read this all as, it's Lighthouse and PageSpeedInsights...not Joomla.

[gws]

In reference to the above post; I have just tested 3 joomla sites 2 x 4.4.0 and 1 x J5 both failed with lighthouse, I also tested 3 sites that are not CMS's and they performed as expected....

[dgreenspan52]

I'm seeing the same performance error (! no screenshots) on my 2 Joomla sites, both on Joomla 4.3.4 with Gantry5 templates. Cleared all caches, tested from different locations, etc., still down.

[LTCreations01]

I agree that if you test a "hand-coded" site, no cms, the results are also true...and it works. I have one that I use for teaching, but that doesn't help our sites that all use a cms.

Clearly LH and PSI are simply not working for any cms - even if they provide results for all the areas. I think, when you test a cms and you get results without errors, you are not getting current results. You are getting results from previous data in that page.

So if you need to test your cms, it's time to find another platform.

Just so everybody knows, if you use GTmetrix, you "must" pay for the platform - or, your results are ONLY for desktop...and who cares about desktop speed?
I haven't test the paid version, so I don't know how accurate those results would be for mobile.

...this just sucks...

[LTCreations01]

I did find a site, free, that seems to work properly - https://www.debugbear.com/test/website-speed - although I don't know how much you can use without paying.

It would seem the site has the "updated" Lighthouse version...because it works.
Perhaps while we wait for google to fix their "stuff", we can use debugbear in the interim.

[nacc]

Read this all as, it's Lighthouse and PageSpeedInsights...not Joomla.

The forum moderators have decided that this is a Joomla problem; that's why this topic is in the Performance - Joomla! 4.x forum and not in The Lounge. There must be something in Joomla that causes these problems that the developers are working on.

[LTCreations01]

That's pretty odd then. The things I've found in Lighthouse on WordPress sites are odd also. Hopefully they can get Joomla fixed, if they say it's their fault. Lighthouse not showing current images for mobile devices....

I have Joomla sites that are still 4.3.4 and get the error for performance. So I don't know how they feel the "update" is what caused the problem.

[gws]

I haven't found any evidence on the issue tracker that it is a joomla problem?

[nacc]

I reported this topic to the moderators and asked it to be moved to The Lounge as a non-Joomla problem. The moderators declined my request; apparently it is a Joomla problem. That’s all I know.

[ebrahimm]

Hi.

To solve the error, go to Plugins -> "System - HTTP Headers" and set "Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy" to "Disabled"

[gws]

Good catch @ebrahimm.
Confirmed disabling the "Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy" and Lighthouse works.

[LTCreations01]

I just tried the suggestion about "Cross-Origin" and it did not work on my J4 4.3.4 version.

I ran both Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights and both still have the same error as well as the exclamation point for Performance.

[blaze41]

Hi.

To solve the error, go to Plugins -> "System - HTTP Headers" and set "Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy" to "Disabled"

Worked great...Thank you!

[MarkA]

Hi.

To solve the error, go to Plugins -> "System - HTTP Headers" and set "Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy" to "Disabled"

Yes! This worked for me as well. I'm running a Joomla 4 website built using YooTheme and this resolved my Lighthouse error.