PWA and First Meaningful Paint Removed from PageSpeed Insights API

Updated on Oct 23, 2025

If you’ve noticed missing metrics or errors in your PageSpeed Insights API results, you’re not imagining things. Google has officially removed First Meaningful Paint (FMP) and Progressive Web App (PWA) audits from both Lighthouse and the PageSpeed Insights API. We noticed the change on 20th October 2025.

Why These Metrics Were Removed

First Meaningful Paint was one of Lighthouse’s earliest attempts to measure when key content appears, but it became unreliable as web rendering grew more complex. Google has replaced it with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — a Core Web Vital that better reflects what users actually see as a page loads. That caused this error in our parser:

Undefined array key "first-meaningful-paint"

The PWA audits were dropped as part of Google’s simplification of Lighthouse. While PWA best practices remain important, the audits themselves are now optional and available through Lighthouse CI or Web.dev for developers who still need them. If you try to get PWA back as a category, you will see the same error we did:

{"error":{"code":500,"message":"Lighthouse returned error: UNKNOWN_ERROR. Unknown error encountered with message 'unrecognized category in 'onlyCategories': pwa'","errors":[{"message":"Lighthouse returned error: UNKNOWN_ERROR. Unknown error encountered with message 'unrecognized category in 'onlyCategories': pwa'","domain":"lighthouse","reason":"lighthouseError"}]}}

What It Means for PageSpeedPlus Users

At PageSpeedPlus, we’ve updated our reports and dashboards to reflect these changes. You’ll no longer see first-meaningful-paint or PWA-related audit fields in API responses or reports. Core metrics such as LCP, CLS, FID, and TBT remain available and continue to drive overall performance scores.

Historical data for FMP will stay visible, but it will not update going forward.

Looking Ahead

These changes align with Google’s shift toward Core Web Vitals as the definitive measure of user experience. PageSpeedPlus will continue adapting to these updates — including upcoming support for real-user monitoring (RUM) to give you even more accurate performance insights.