Multiple bugs have been reported in Google’s new website and SEO analysis tool, Web.dev, which have been confirmed as known issues.
Web.dev was just released yesterday in open beta, so issues are to be expected in these early stages.
With that said, it’s important for developers and SEOs to be aware of these issues when using Web.dev to perform site audits.
If the tool reports on an error that you believe to be false, check to see if it’s a known issue. It’s possible there’s not really an error at all.
Our own developer, Vahan Petrosyan, spent a sleepless night trying to fix an error on this site when there wasn’t anything wrong in the first place. It was just a bug in the Web.dev tool.
https://t.co/FPQdZuT8AY you owe me a night of good sleep. 😀 Was fixing all the night why SEJ is on HTTP1 when we have HTTP2 enabled. Turns out it is a bug https://t.co/etnpf4uO3X cc @lorenbaker @TopHatArsen
— Vahan Pеtrosyаn (@vahandev) November 14, 2018
The error he’s referencing has to do with Web.dev incorrectly reporting that a site does not support HTTP/2.
This has been confirmed as a bug here.
Vahan encountered another issue with that tool where Web.dev is reporting on HTML elements that do not exist.
@googlewmc How does https://t.co/lp5GjwC44h tool finds these HTML elements in our source https://t.co/cOrKPpL1uk at https://t.co/raUW9n5Rf5 ?
I couldn't find any instance of table or audio element in our source even in complied HTML. cc @lorenbaker— Vahan Pеtrosyаn (@vahandev) November 14, 2018
Google developer Rob Dodson confirmed another bug in which Web.dev says nothing is a PWA (Progressive Web App).
BTW if you're using https://t.co/8LhuUMZS4R there is a known bug in the alpha version of Lighthouse that we're using which says nothing is a PWA 😂 We're working on a fix!
— Rob Dodson (@rob_dodson) November 12, 2018
Dodson goes on to explain that the bugs originate from the version of Lighthouse that Web.dev is running.
The version of lighthouse running at https://t.co/mxSIxUONq9 has some bugs. But if you run lighthouse from chrome devtools itself then it should be fine. We will update the status post again later today.
— Rob Dodson (@rob_dodson) November 14, 2018
If you encounter anything unusual that you believe to be an error, report it as an issue on this GitHub forum, or check to see if anyone else has reported it first.
As the issues get ironed out, the development team will provide users with an updated status report here.
