aclu.org website review

38 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (1.9 MB).

8 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 4.7 s.

About 457 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.0 s faster on a phone.

ThreatMetrix costs a phone 1.1 s of main-thread work and 264 KiB of downloads while your page loads. That alone is enough to make taps feel slow. Loading it after the page is usable, or only on the pages that need it, takes that off the critical path.

Your mobile performance score is 47 (desktop: 57). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

7 third-party services load with your homepage (ThreatMetrix, Optimizely and heap-api.com and others), adding 756 KiB and 1.4 s of main-thread time.

About 535 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

14 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 656 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

9 images could be 535 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

A phone's processor spends 2.7 s on main-thread work while loading, 2.0 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

198 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

68 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

Critical files load one after another instead of in parallel (3 chains). Preconnecting to key origins and preloading the hero image shortens the chain.

The page becomes fully interactive after 20.8 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

The first text or image appears after 5.4 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 6.7 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the element shown below.

Visually, the page fills in at 5.4 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 524 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

The layout shifts by 0.102 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-10, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 117 ms to 127 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-10, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.4 s to 2.1 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 3.1 MB in 101 requests on a phone: scripts 1.4 MB (36), images 886 KiB (17) and stylesheets 518 KiB (11). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

4 images (197 KiB) are JPEG, PNG or GIF. The same pictures as WebP or AVIF are usually much smaller at the same quality, and every current browser shows them.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.89 g of CO₂e: 106.9 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Some lists contain elements other than list items, which screen readers announce wrongly.

<svg> elements with an img or image role must have alternative text: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated serious by axe-core.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 7 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Heading levels should only increase by one: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Your title is 236 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “American Civil Liberties Union | The ACLU dares to create a more perfect union — beyond o…”.

Your meta description is 203 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

No XML sitemap at https://www.aclu.org/sitemap.xml, so Google discovers your pages only by following links.

The homepage links to 31 pages on aclu.org and 6 external pages.

There is no /llms.txt, a short Markdown guide to your key pages for AI tools (llmstxt.org). It is optional and few AI tools read it yet, so treat it as a cheap extra.

/issues/civil-liberties is marked noindex but linked from your homepage. If it is meant to be found, remove the noindex.

/issues/reproductive-freedom/abortion and /issues/lgbtq-rights/transgender-rights use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 30 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

2 of 9 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

2 third-party cookies are set on load; browsers are restricting these, so whatever relies on them breaks.

Chrome logged issues while loading the page (“Cookie”).

Large scripts ship without source maps.

Neither X-Frame-Options nor a CSP frame-ancestors policy is set, so any site can embed yours in a frame.

X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff is missing, so browsers may guess file types.

No Referrer-Policy header, so full URLs can leak to the sites you link to.

There is no /.well-known/security.txt telling researchers how to report a security problem to you.

aclu.org has no CAA record, so any certificate authority may issue a certificate for it. A CAA record naming your provider (for example letsencrypt.org) closes that door.

aclu.org's DNS answers are not signed. DNSSEC stops attackers forging them to send visitors or email elsewhere; most registrars switch it on in a click, though most sites still run without it.

On a phone, there is no call to action on the first screen: visitors have to scroll to find out what to do next.

We found no call-to-action buttons or links (such as “Book a demo” or “Get a quote”) anywhere on the homepage.

No testimonials, customer logos, ratings or customer counts on the homepage: nothing tells a new visitor that others already trust you.

No analytics or tag manager detected in the HTML, so you can't measure whether any of these fixes work.

No phone number or email link on the homepage, so ready-to-buy visitors have one fewer way to reach you.

There is no form on the homepage, so every lead has to click through to another page first.

The homepage carries about 815 words of visible text.

Email authentication: SPF record 25 points, plus 15 when it ends in -all (10 for ~all); DMARC record 25, plus 25 for a reject policy (15 for quarantine); a DKIM key on a common selector 10.

Opening the homepage sets 14 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

No known cookie consent tool loads with the page. Some sites build their own banner, and some only show one to visitors from the EU.

Loading the homepage contacts 15 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.