Lighthouse accessibility audit alternatives for storefront monitoring

Lighthouse is a useful free smoke test built into Chrome, but it is a manual, single-page, point-in-time check with no memory. It cannot watch a deploy, compare against last week, or prove anything later. The alternative for production storefronts is monitoring that rescans on every deploy, diffs against your clean baseline, and keeps the dated record.

Where Lighthouse fits and where it stops

As a developer smoke test it is genuinely good: fast, free, and consistent. Its score covers only the page state in front of it, only a subset of automatable criteria, and only when someone runs it. It produces no history, no cross-template view, and nothing an attorney or insurer would accept as evidence of a program.

What a monitoring layer adds

Deploy-triggered rescans of changed routes in a real browser context, weekly full-site scans, per-template trend lines, and monthly evidence reports. Failures are attributed to the responsible release, so a regression becomes a ticket with a cause. Lighthouse stays in the developer's toolbox; monitoring is the record underneath it. Start with a free accessibility audit of one surface.