Description
Why?
There are several reasons why we need to remove the widget.
Primarily being that it doesn't add the kind of value that we'd like to see. The reports are too heavily tied to the performance of our backend service. If the server is running other reports or is just having a "bad day" content editors (clients) might think that their pages are suddenly receiving awful performance metrics. Sadly the Lighthouse performance audits can vary wildly from device to device, the processing power available to Chromium (Lighthouse), the current network connection, or the current network load (both our server and your site).
The other main reason is that it's starting to burn a decent-sized hole in my wallet. I've continued to throw more resources at the server and even switched over to running it in AWS Lambda functions in order to provide better (stable) performance audits and API availability (due to the fact that only one audit can be performed at a time).
Lighthouse reports should be performed using your browser's Dev Tools or on the https://web.dev/measure site. You can also set up automated lighthouse testing with https://www.npmjs.com/package/lighthouse via tools like GitHub Actions or Gitlab CI.