Lighthouse first meaningful paint extremely high

Question

I'm using Lighthouse from Google to check my PWA on performance and stuff. However, I always get extreme numbers with First meaningful paint. The last test the results gave me: 14445.7ms. But when I use the website on my own it never loads then more than 2 seconds? Am I doing something wrong here?

Answer 1

Lighthouse renders your browser connection to a slower speed to test how your application would run on a slower 3G connection (simulation of someone on a slower mobile connection). So if you are just loading your web application in your desktop browser (or even your mobile browser because your connection is most likely superior to the simulated connection) it will be significantly faster than the Lighthouse simulation.

As far as first paint goes, the first place I would begin to look is The PRPL pattern --

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/prpl-pattern/

-- as well as taking an in-depth look at the Lighthouse report because it actually tells you what can be better optimized on your app if your score is not ideal.