When Lighthouse CI Becomes a Full-Time Job for Agency Dev Teams

Lighthouse CI integrates well into CI/CD pipelines early on, helping teams catch performance regressions before merges, but its maintenance burden grows significantly as client portfolios expand. Agencies managing five to fifteen or more client sites often find themselves juggling mismatched version pins, inconsistent assertion policies, and flaky runners that erode trust in the merge gate. Over time, one developer typically inherits all lighthouserc files and spends unpaid hours resolving Chrome update breakages and producing manual reports for account managers. The core problem is that CI/CD pipelines were designed for narrow merge protection, not for ongoing scheduled monitoring or client-facing performance reporting. The recommended fix is keeping pipeline checks focused on a small set of trusted preview URLs while offloading broader monitoring and reporting to a dedicated managed layer.