astro-website/openspec/changes/lighthouse-remediation/proposal.md

Why

Increase technical robustness by remediating the specific issues flagged by Chrome Lighthouse so the primary surface (homepage) can achieve a 100 score across categories.

Lighthouse sources:

• C:\Users\simpl\Downloads\santhoshj.com-20260210T182644.json (desktop)
• C:\Users\simpl\Downloads\santhoshj.com-20260210T182538.json (mobile)

What Changes

• Fix accessibility contrast failures (WCAG AA) for card metadata and pill chips.
• Fix SEO hygiene issues:
  • robots.txt must reference a valid sitemap URL
  • eliminate non-crawlable anchor markup that Lighthouse flags (e.g., anchors without href in modal UI)
• Eliminate Best Practices "Issues" panel findings related to Content Security Policy.
• Improve Performance audits that prevent a perfect score, primarily on mobile:
  • optimize above-the-fold image delivery (thumbnails/covers)
  • reduce render-blocking resources (font CSS)
  • ensure CSS/JS delivery is optimized (minification and unused code reduction)
  • improve cache lifetimes where applicable for first-party assets, and mitigate third-party cache lifetime penalties where feasible.

Capabilities

New Capabilities

• asset-delivery-optimization: Ensure critical assets (CSS/fonts/images) are delivered in a Lighthouse-friendly way (minified, non-blocking where possible, and appropriately cached) and that mobile LCP is consistently fast.
• security-headers: Define and implement a CSP baseline and related headers that eliminate DevTools "Issues" panel findings without breaking third-party integrations.

Modified Capabilities

• wcag-responsive-ui: Strengthen the baseline to explicitly require sufficient text contrast for secondary/muted UI text and pill/chip labels so the site passes Lighthouse contrast checks.
• seo-content-surface: Strengthen robots + sitemap correctness and require that link-like UI uses crawlable markup (valid href when an anchor is used).

Impact

• Affected UI/CSS: card footer metadata (.muted) and pill styling; modal CTA markup.
• Affected SEO assets: robots.txt sitemap line.
• Affected security posture: CSP and related headers (may require changes to how third-party scripts are loaded).
• Affected performance: image source/size strategy for thumbnails/covers; font delivery strategy; CSS/JS build pipeline and cache headers.