So, what’s the deal with Lighthouse? Even though I have moved it to the Legacy section of the website, I’m still updating the plugin to keep it up to standards.
The latest release removed a deprecated Yoast filter, removed a pre-4.7 option and updated WordPress compatibility. I believe the plugin is now faster than ever and it will help optimizing your WordPress site. I have been using it here, on getButterfly.com, for years.
Why use Lighthouse?
WordPress is now slower than ever, and even though there are countless optimization plugins, they have too many options and they try to keep compatible with too many old versions.
Lighthouse focuses on the last 3 minor versions, at most, as its security and performance modules demand the latest version of WordPress, anyway.
For example, WordPress is now at version 5.2.2 and Lighthouse will warn you if you are below this version, or below PHP 7.2 or below MySQL 5.5 (this is questionable, though, as there’s also MariaDB and Percona, but Lighthouse does not differentiate).
As performance and security is tightly linked to an SSL certificate, the plugin will require an active SSL certificate starting from version 3.
