How to audit 404 (not-found) html page with lighthouse

Hi,

when I try to run audit on 404 page, the lighthouse complains that it was faulty request and it can’t continue.

runtimeError:
      { code: 'ERRORED_DOCUMENT_REQUEST',
        message:
         'Lighthouse was unable to reliably load the page you requested. Make sure you are testing the correct URL and that the server is properly responding to all requests. (Status code: 404)' },

I wonder why is there this restriction? Is there a way to bypass this and actually test 404 HTML page?

Thank you

[patrickhulce]

can you explain what you mean please?

Sure. You mentioned that if you host your site in such a way that navigating directly to a URL doesn’t result in the page loading (and instead gives a 404) then Lighthouse can’t measure it. I was saying if this is true, then a user can’t visit it either.

I don’t observe what you are describing so maybe we don’t talk about the same thing?

Are you saying that your 404 error page is a client-side redirect to the underlying page (or a copy of your SPA)? If so, I see how we were talking past each other 😃 This still isn’t advisable from the SEO side of things (or from the performance side of things if a redirect), but your point is taken that it’s better served by an audit failure rather than a fatal error.

I’m inclined to agree this should be a toplevel warning rather than a fatal error, or at a minimum an optional flag to optout. Just a question of bandwidth of who is available to work on it.

[ondrejsevcik]

Thanks for the tip.

It would be useful to bypass this without writing a workaround code. There could be an argument like --ignore-not-found or similar.