🚀 Achieving 100/100 Lighthouse Metrics: A Technical Breakdown

3 min readMay 8, 2024

2024, MAY 07

In my previous post I shared how we achieved almost all 100/100 Lighthouse metrics. Here’s a breakdown of how we did it:

Backend Servers:

Nginx as API Gateway (entry point):

Used as a load balancer and routed as per requirement.
Protip: Avoid regex concatenation to prevent slowing down routing.
Utilized Gzip compression for improved performance (Remember, it comes with a cost).
Dropped SSL at API gateway to increase performance.
Utilized the socket method for proxy_pass or routing to avoid direct connection to localhost: port.
Configured nginx for request pooling at 100 req/sec.
Added rate limiting at 50 req/sec per IP.

Django Server:

Celery Worker:

Used for all cron tasks, long-running tasks, emails/SMS, etc. to avoid blocking user responses.
Improved API responses by 80–90%.
Enabled the main server to focus more on serving user requests.

Cache-Server (ExpressJs):

Implemented cache.ornaz.com (express-based server) to reduce the load on the main server.
Reduced main server load by 70%.
Decreased API response time to 30–60 ms.
Utilized pm2 for management and multiple threads to serve requests.
Used a shared global in-memory cache to serve content, ensuring website functionality even if the main server is down.
Served inventory APIs and SEO APIs to get SEO details along with JSON-LD data.

Logging Server (Express-based service):

Reduced server load on the main server by adding a microservice for logging logging.ornaz.com .
Triggered all campaign events for further processing.
Used for running marketing campaigns, user journey flow, and conversion funnels.

Monitoring Server:

Utilized Prometheus and Grafana to monitor all nodes’ detailed metrics in real-time.
Used Sentry to monitor errors.

Campaign Service:

Utilized a third-party service for creating campaigns (sending WhatsApp messages, emails, push notifications) based on user journey/conversion flows.

React-Native (Mobile):

Utilized for mobile-web, Android app, and iOS app.
Utilized React-Native web to create a static JS client-side server, served from CDN.
Used CDN for fast serving (28 ms response time).
Utilized service workers to cache everything that is not user-specific, ensuring offline functionality.
Cached APIs at the service-worker level, further reducing server load.

Next.js Server (Desktop):

Django server (Fallback):

Used as a fallback to serve pages exploiting the MVT Framework.
Served campaign-based pages that were changed daily, ensuring a seamless user experience.

Used code splitting and lazy load whenever possible in an effective manner.
Served static content from CDN with caching for more than 2 weeks.
Utilized service worker to cache APIs.
Preloaded main-banner assets.
Pre-connected domains.
Minimized the number of domains and APIs hit, combining APIs when possible, and avoiding request chaining.
Used async/await efficiently, with careful consideration.
Split CSS and JS modules as per loading order.
Converted images into webP (Avif can also be used) and served them from CDN.
Used srcsets with thumbnails for images > 300px render size.
Maintained a 1:1.5 ratio for intrinsic size: render size.
Utilized well-maintained schema/state/store for hydration.
Always preferred HTML5 SEO-friendly elements.
Avoided extra DOM elements.
Stayed aware of content layout shifts.
Meta tags were crucial for SEO, refer to ornaz.com for best practices.
Protip: Used Lighthouse to check for errors and fixed them.

Stay tuned for more insights on how we optimized SEO and much more!
Please checkout https://ashutoshverma.com/lighthouse-score-breakdown/ for more.