Experience Audit Dashboard experience-audit-dashboard
Learn how Experience Audit validates your deployment process and helps ensure that changes deployed meet baseline standards for performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO through a clear, informative dashboard interface.
Overview overview
Experience Audit validates the deployment process and helps ensure that the changes deployed:
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Meet baseline standards for performance, accessibility, best practices, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and PWA (Progressive Web App).
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Do not introduce regressions.
Experience Audit in Cloud Manager ensures that the user’s experience on the site are of the highest standards.
The audit results are informational and allow the deployment manager to see the scores and the change between the current and previous scores. This insight is valuable to determine if there is a regression that was introduced with the current deployment.
Experience Audit is powered by Google Lighthouse, an open source tool from Google, and is enabled in all Cloud Manager production pipelines.
Availability availability
Experience Audit is available for Cloud Manager:
- Sites production pipelines, by default
- Development full-stack pipelines, optionally
- Development front-end pipelines, optionally
See the Configuration section for more information on how to configure the audit for the optional environments.
Audits are run as part of the pipeline. Audits can also be run on-demand outside of pipelines.
Configuration configuration
Experience Audit is available by default for production pipelines. It can be be optionally enabled for development full-stack and front-end pipelines. In all cases, you need to define which content paths are evaluated during pipeline execution.
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Depending on the type of pipeline you wish to configure, follow the directions to:
- Add a new production pipeline, if you wish to define the paths to be evaluated by the audit.
- Add a new non-production pipeline, if you wish to enable the audit on a front-end or development full-stack pipeline.
- Or you can edit an existing pipeline, and update the existing options.
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If you are adding or editing a non-production pipeline for which you want to use Experience Audit, you must select the Experience Audit checkbox on the Source Code tab.
- This is only necessary for non-production pipelines.
- The Experience Audit tab appears when the checkbox is selected.
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For both production and non-production pipelines, you define the paths that should be included in the Experience Audit on the Experience Audit tab.
- Page paths must start with
/and are relative to your site. - For example, if your site is
wknd.siteand would like to includehttps://wknd.site/us/en/about-us.htmlin the Experience Audit, enter the path/us/en/about-us.html.
- Page paths must start with
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Tap or click Add Page and the path is auto-completed with the address of your environment and added to the table of paths.
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Continue to add paths as necessary by repeating the previous two steps.
- You can add a maximum of 25 paths.
- If you do not define any paths, the homepage of the site is included in the Experience Audit by default.
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Click Save to save your pipeline.
Experience Audit Results results
The results of the Experience Audit are presented in the Stage testing phase of the production pipeline via the production pipeline execution page.
Experience Audit provides the median Google Lighthouse scores for the configured pages and the difference in score to the previous scan.
From this summary view in the Stage Testing phase of the pipeline, you have two options:
In addition to the summary presented in the details of a pipeline run, you can also directly access the full results of the audit by using the Reports tab of the Cloud Manager dashboard to access the full report directly.
- If you would like details on how the audit works, please see the section Experience Audit Evaluation Details.
- If you would like to know how to run an experience audit on demand, please see the section On-Demand Audit Reports.
- If you experience issues with the audit, please see the section Experience Audit Encounters Issues.
- For general performance tips, please see the section General Performance Tips.
View Slowest Pages view-slowest-pages
Tapping or clicking View slowest pages opens the Slowest 5 pages dialog, showing the five lowest-performing pages that you configured to audit.
The scores are broken down by Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO along with the deviation of each metric from the last audit.
By default, the dialog opens with the scores for mobile devices. You can change this to desktop scores using the Devices toggle at the top of the dialog.
The dialog is intended for a quick overview. For full details, tap or click View full report.
View Full Report view-full-report
You can view the full Experience Audit report by:
- Tapping or clicking View full report in the Slowest 5 pages dialog.
- Tapping or clicking View full report when viewing the execution of a pipeline.
- Tapping or clicking the Reports tab in Cloud Manager.
The Reports tab of Cloud Manager is opened, showing the Experience audit.
The report is split into two areas:
Page scores - trend trend
By default, the selected view for Page scores - trend is median scores for the Last 6 months.
Use the Select and View drop-downs at the top and bottom of the chart button to select page-specific details and different time frames, respectively. Tap or click the and the update trend button at the top of the chart to apply the selections and refresh the chart.
When moving the mouse over the chart, a tooltip displays the values for the Google Lighthouse categories at specific points in time.
If you tap or click on the chart at a point in time, a popover opens with detail of that scan. Tap or click the open experience audit scan to load that scan results into the Experience audit scan results section.
Experience Audit Scan Results scan-results
The Experience audit scan results section gives recommendations on how to improve your score and details of all the pages scanned. It is divided into two sections:
Recommendations recommendations
The Recommendations section shows an aggregate set of insights. By default, recommendations for performance are displayed. Use the drop-down next to the Recommendations heading to change to another category.
Tap or click the chevron for any recommendation to reveal details about it.
When available, the expanded recommendation details also contain the percentage of the recommendations impact, to help focus on the most impactful changes.
Tap or click the view pages link in the details view to see the pages to which the recommendation applies.
Scanned Pages scanned-pages
The Scanned pages section gives details scores on all scanned pages. You can use the Prev and Next buttons to page through the results and choose on how many the display should paginate.
Tapping or clicking the link of a particular page updates the Select filter of the Page scores - trend section and shows the Scores & recommendations tab for the selected page.
The Raw reports tab gives you scores for every audit of the page. Tap or click the Download icon to retrieve a JSON file of the raw data.
This opens a new tab in your browser, pointing to https://googlechrome.github.io/lighthouse/viewer/ with a signed URL of the Lighthouse raw JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) report for the selected page, which opens automatically for your detailed inspection
On-Demand Audit Reports on-demand
In addition to being run during pipeline execution, Experience Audit reports can also be generated on-demand. This is a good solution to quickly scan your pages, without having to run a pipeline.
To run an on-demand scan, navigate to the Reports tab to see the complete audit report and then tap or click the Run scan button.
On-demand scans trigger an Experience Audit for the latest 25 configured pages and typically finish in a few minutes.
Upon completion, the scores chart will be automatically updated, and you can inspect the results exactly as for a pipeline execution scan.
You can filter the scores chart based on the trigger type by using the Trigger selector.
Experience Audit Encounters Issues issues
If pages you configured to be audited were not available, Experience Audit reflects this.
The pipeline shows an expandable error section to view the relative URL paths it could not access.
If viewing the full report, details are shown in the Experience audit scan results section.
Some reasons that the pages might not be available are that:
- The configuration blocks access.
- The page does not exist.
- The page redirects requiring authentication other than basic.
- An internal issue occurred.
- Etc.
General Performance Tips performance-tips
Two of the most common impactful issues that are easy to fix relate to Cumulative Layout Shifts (CLS) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
These can be improved by:
- Not lazy loading the images above the fold (the content visible in the browser without needing to scroll down).
- Properly prioritizing how resources are loaded (e.g. by asynchronously loading the images below the fold after the document has loaded).
- Prefetching JavaScript and CSS files that are used to render content above the fold (if they are necessary).
- Reserving the vertical space by assigning an aspect ratio to containers that either load slowly or are rendered later.
- Converting images to WebP format to reduce their size.
- Using
<picture>and imagesrcsetwith varying image sizes for different viewport sizes (and ensuring that the resizing works).
Experience Audit Evaluation Details details
The following details provide additional information on how the Experience Audit evaluates your site. They are not necessary for general usage of the feature and are provided here for completeness.
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Although the configured Experience Audit page paths show the
.comdomain of the publisher, the audit scans the origin (.net) domain, to ensure issues introduced during development are detected.- The
.comdomain uses a CDN and could yield better scores or contain cached results.
- The
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In production full-stack pipelines, the staging environment is scanned.
- To ensure the audit provides relevant details during auditing, the staging environment’s content should be as close as possible to the production environment.
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The pages displayed in the Select dropdown in the Page scores - trend section are all known pages that were scanned in the past by the Experience Audit.
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A recommendation can have a potential gain and a difference from the previous scan.
- Experience Audit estimates the potential gain by processing the raw report for each page and correlating the wasted bytes or milliseconds with an insight that has a weighted impact on the performance score.
- The audit provides this information (as well as the affected pages) to help decide which recommendation to pursue.
- For more details, please see the General Performance Tips section
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Given that a frontend pipeline could deploy to an existing environment (or there could be multiple frontend pipelines targeting the same environment), and the scan results are aggregated at an environment level, the scores, trends, and recommendations are displayed in the same selected environment, regardless of the pipeline execution that triggered the scan.