What's in the baseline report?
When you start on the Standard tier, you get a baseline report — a one-time, whole-site snapshot of up to 2000 pages. Think of it as the "before" photo: a clear picture of exactly where your website stands today, so every improvement afterwards has something to be measured against.
It's your call when to run it. Right away, to see precisely where you're starting from — or later, for example after a big redesign, since you may already have a good sense of your current site.
So what actually goes into it? Four things.
1. Google Lighthouse — the lab view
Lighthouse is Google's open-source auditing engine — the same one built into Chrome's developer tools. For each page in the baseline, we run Lighthouse and capture how it scores across performance, accessibility, SEO and best practice.
This is lab data: a page loaded under controlled, repeatable conditions. That's exactly what you want for a baseline, because it's consistent. When you re-test a page later, any change in the score comes from a change in your page — not from a faster network or a quieter server that day.
2. Real Chrome-user data (CrUX), the past six months
Lab data tells you how a page can perform. Real-world data tells you how it actually performs for the people visiting it — and those two can differ a lot.
For that, the baseline pulls in the Chrome UX Report (CrUX) — Google's dataset of real, anonymised measurements collected from actual Chrome visitors to your site. Where it's available, we include the CrUX origin data (your site as a whole) for the past six months, so you can see the trend, not just a single moment.
Two things to know:
- "If available." CrUX only publishes data for sites that get enough real Chrome traffic to report on anonymously. Smaller or newer sites may not have it yet — in that case this section is simply noted as unavailable, and the Lighthouse view still stands on its own.
- Field vs lab. CrUX is field data (real visitors, real devices, real networks); Lighthouse is lab data. Seeing both side by side is the point — it tells you whether a problem shows up only in the lab, or is really hurting visitors.
3. Cookies set without consent
The baseline checks each page for cookies that are set before the visitor has agreed to them — the kind that can put you on the wrong side of privacy rules like the GDPR and the ePrivacy directive.
You get a clear list of where it's happening across your site, so a genuine problem doesn't stay hidden on some page nobody thought to check.
4. The third parties reaching your pages
Finally, the baseline maps the third-party domains your pages contact — analytics, fonts, embedded video, chat widgets, ad and marketing tags, and anything else loaded from outside your own site.
Every third party is code you don't fully control, running on your visitors' devices: a potential privacy exposure, a performance cost, and a dependency that can break or start misbehaving without warning. The report shows which third parties are contributing to your pages and how widely they appear — so you can confirm that what's actually loading matches what you promised your visitors.
Reading it as one picture
None of these four is very useful in isolation. Together they answer a single, honest question: how is this website really doing, right now, across everything that matters?
- Lighthouse shows what your pages score under controlled conditions.
- CrUX shows what real visitors have actually experienced over the last six months.
- Cookies without consent and third parties show what your site is really doing on the privacy side.
That's your baseline. From there, every recurring test tells you whether you're moving in the right direction — measured against a starting point you can trust.
Curious what your own baseline would show? See the plans, or drop us a line at hello@webperf.se.