What this Lighthouse checker shows you
Four 0-100 scores straight from Google's PageSpeed Insights API: Performance, SEO (meta tags, structure, mobile-friendliness), Accessibility (WCAG basics) and Best Practices (HTTPS, deprecated APIs, console errors). Alongside them we return the underlying lab metrics — Largest Contentful Paint, First Contentful Paint, Total Blocking Time, Speed Index and Cumulative Layout Shift — because the score alone rarely tells you what to fix.
Which Core Web Vitals actually feed the Performance score
This trips up almost every article on the subject, so it is worth being precise. The Lighthouse Performance score is a lab measurement weighted from five audits: Total Blocking Time, Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, Speed Index and First Contentful Paint. Interaction to Next Paint is NOT one of them. INP is a field metric, collected from real Chrome users and reported through CrUX and Search Console — Lighthouse cannot measure it in a lab run, and neither this tool nor the badge returns it. If you are chasing INP, the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console is the place to look, not a Lighthouse score.
Mobile and desktop scores differ — by design
PageSpeed Insights simulates a throttled mid-range mobile device by default, which is why the same page can score far lower on mobile than on desktop. Our own pages were a fair example when we measured them in October 2026: 98-100 on desktop against 85-88 on mobile, with a hydration issue as the main culprit. This checker reports the mobile result unless you ask for desktop, because mobile is what Google indexes first.
How often the badge refreshes
Once a site is registered with FeedPulse, its scores re-fetch every 6 hours, so a deploy shows up on the badge the same day. One-off lookups of third-party domains are cached for 14 days, which keeps us inside Google's API quota — those pages rarely change hour to hour anyway. You can also force a fresh run from the Refresh control on the result panel. The first ever check of a URL we have never seen can take up to about 90 seconds, because PageSpeed Insights runs the audit from scratch; repeat checks return instantly from cache.
Does a Lighthouse score affect Google rankings?
Indirectly, and less than most posts imply. Core Web Vitals are part of Google's page-experience signals, and Google has been explicit that they act as a tie-breaker between pages of comparable relevance rather than a way to outrank better-matching content. A genuinely slow page can lose ground on competitive queries; a 94 instead of an 89 will not move you. The honest reason to watch the score is that LCP and CLS track things real visitors feel.
Embed the badge on any platform — one HTML snippet
Use it as a Lighthouse score checker for any URL you like, then paste the badge wherever you want the result on show: WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Webflow, Ghost, Squarespace, Blogger or plain static HTML. It re-reads its scores on the schedule above, so it keeps reflecting the current state of the site rather than freezing at install time.