New comment by modernerd in "Web.dev by Google"

Web.dev looks incredible for educating web developers, exposing Lighthouse to devs who aren't already familiar with it, and for automating basic website testing over time.

But it will be a nightmare for support teams working at any kind of web service.

As Google doesn't provide support for this tooling and site owners invariably fixate on the scores it provides, product support teams for everything from WordPress themes to CDNs end up fielding support questions that Google should be helping with via resources pitched at the non-technical folks who inevitably use these tools (as well as, you know, help from an actual human support team).

As it stands, support teams will now be inundated with questions unrelated to their product from customers who have no interest or technical background to read the current educational sections of web.dev, and whose time would be better spent crafting landing pages, great content, or reducing the 38 social plugins they're using instead of making all the dials turn green.

I can already foresee the support requests from the web.dev scores:

“Google says my WordPress site isn't installable. Where's the option for that in your theme?”

“Your website says Cloudflare improves load time. But my first meaningful paint time went up by 1.5 seconds after setting it up! I'm going to write bad reviews about you.”

“Google says I need to theme my browser's address bar to match my branding. I added that tag they mention but don't see any change in my browser.”

It's great to build awareness of ways to make the web faster and better, but it needs to be backed with guidance that's pitched at the ability of the people who will be using these automated testing tools.

For example, why not detect the technology behind the site and — for stuff like WordPress — recommend plugins or other tech-specific resources that could help fix problems like lack of image lazy-loading? There are lots of ways education could be enhanced for non-developers.

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