What's New in the Latest Lighthouse Release

The last few releases of Lighthouse have been silent, and fixed or patched various issues with individual websites. I have a huge network of websites I’m testing Lighthouse on.

Let’s break them down:

Caching
Custom Resource Hints (DNS Prefetch)
Custom Resource Hints (Preconnect)
Dark Mode
Registration Spam
CAPTCHA

Caching

3 new options have been added, mainly for page (browser) caching, and they are very effective for non-member pages, or content that rarely changes. You can find these options in the Performance section of the plugin.

Custom Resource Hints (DNS Prefetch)

All URLs added below will be added to your document’s <head> section as <link rel="dns-prefetch" href="https://example.com">.

Custom Resource Hints (Preconnect)

All URLs added below will be added to your document’s <head> section as <link rel="preconnect" href="https://example.com">.

Both hints options have been there before, but they are now part of the Performance section, and they are better explained. In my case, I am prefetching/preconnecting Google Tag Manager and my ad networks:

https://srv.carbonads.net/
https://www.googletagmanager.com/
https://media.ethicalads.io/

All Performance settings explained

Dark Mode

This has no effect on the front-end, but it’s something I’ve always wanted to have. I wrote about dark mode for Lighthouse before. It’s a nice gimmick, and, if it gets more traction, I might work on it more.

Registration Spam

Again, with a large pool of test websites and customers, I was able to implement some pretty effective registration spam techniques. I also have a manually maintained blacklist, called 4P, which contains thousands of blacklisted email domains.

Unfortunately, there are lots of Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook emails that cannot be blocked. You should use an IP-based restriction plugin or Cloudflare.

Regardless, my settings below will stop around 60% of all registration spam.