In November last year, Google integrated their new Lighthouse platform into the usual PageSpeed Insights tool. While this was a great update, unlocking a greater range of page speed data, it wasn’t perfect.
One flaw that was bothering us (until now!) is that the ‘Opportunities’ and ‘Diagnostics’ sections of the report make several recommendations pertinent to specific URLs, but they don’t include an option to export the data in any way. To make it even more difficult, the URLs featured in each section of the report are only snippets of the full URL. So, if you want to copy a single URL, you would have to inspect the code and grab it from there. Not fun.
While most similar tools come with a CSV-exporting feature to address this issue, Google doesn’t have this in the current version. We assume this is an intentional decision accompanied with a good reason by Google, but we’ll be damned if they’re going to dangle sweet page speed improvement opportunities in front of us with no way of exporting this valuable data at scale.
So, what’s the solution? This is what we’ve come up with, broken down into 6 simple steps.
Run your PageSpeed report.
Expand the first recommendations where you’d like to copy the list of URLs.
Right-click where you see “URL” at the top of the list of URLs. Click “inspect”.
Once in Chrome DevTools with all the code visible, find and right-click the table class and copy element.
Open this Browserling tool and paste your code in the box. Then hit ‘Extract Links!’
Paste into a fresh Excel sheet.
Tip: When we did this, there was an annoying bit of code at the end of each URL: “><div
To get rid of this, simply run a find and replace.
Click “Replace All” and you’re done! You’ve got your list of affected URLs for that issue.
Repeat this process for any other issues you wish to get a full list of URLs for.
Still struggling with your Lighthouse reports? Reach out for a chat and we’ll see how we can help.