adweek.com website review

14 images could be 2.3 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 8.7 s faster on a phone.

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

A phone's processor spends 14.7 s on main-thread work while loading, 5.9 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

Sentry costs a phone 1.0 s of main-thread work and 36 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 11 (desktop: 42). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Sentry, Google Tag Manager and Pubmatic and others), adding 2.7 MB and 2.7 s of main-thread time.

About 1.5 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 770 ms faster on a phone.

156 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (944 KiB).

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 371 ms of main-thread work and 556 KiB of downloads while your page loads. Loading it after the page is usable, or only on the pages that need it, takes that off the critical path.

Google/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 255 ms of main-thread work and 725 KiB of downloads while your page loads. Loading it after the page is usable, or only on the pages that need it, takes that off the critical path.

Pubmatic costs a phone 285 ms of main-thread work and 71 KiB of downloads while your page loads. Loading it after the page is usable, or only on the pages that need it, takes that off the critical path.

Google CDN costs a phone 216 ms of main-thread work and 733 KiB of downloads while your page loads. Loading it after the page is usable, or only on the pages that need it, takes that off the critical path.

20 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 271 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

The page has 1,880 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

Polyfills for old browsers add 85 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

About 21 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

Desktop scores 42 but mobile only 11. A gap that wide usually means heavy scripts and images that hit phones hardest.

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

Scripts make the browser recalculate the layout repeatedly while the page loads, which wastes processor time on phones.

Real Chrome users on phones do not pass Google's Core Web Vitals on this page (28-day field data from the Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab)). Google uses this in ranking.

Your largest element takes 20.4 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Ads of the Week: 13 Campaigns That Caught Our Eye, From Chi…”.

Visually, the page fills in at 17.6 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 62.1 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

The layout shifts by 0.655 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

The first text or image appears after 5.0 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 980 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Real visitors wait 2.6 s for the largest content to appear (75th percentile). Good is under 2.5 s.

Real visitors see the first content after 2.1 s (75th percentile). Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 1.2 s for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

3 images have no width and height attributes, so the layout jumps as each one loads.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-10, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 204 ms to 188 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 8.8 MB in 1,153 requests on a phone: scripts 3.9 MB (147), images 3.3 MB (352) and other files 864 KiB (498). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

AdsofWeekOct16.png weighs 1,020 KiB. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

8 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example AdsofWeekOct16.png at 1,200 px wide, shown at 360 px. Resized copies would save about 1.2 MB.

11 images further down the page (1.3 MB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

AdsofWeekOct16.png is on the first screen but marked loading="lazy", so the browser waits before fetching it and the page looks finished later. Load it eagerly (and give it fetchpriority="high" if it is the main image).

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 2.48 g of CO₂e: 297.9 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

7 buttons have no accessible name, so screen readers announce just “button”.

6 text elements don't have enough contrast against the background to read easily, especially outdoors on a phone.

6 tap targets are too small or too close together to hit reliably with a finger.

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

Main landmark should not be contained in another landmark: 15 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Landmarks should have a unique role or role/label/title (i.e. accessible name) combination: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Contentinfo landmark should not be contained in another landmark: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Document should not have more than one main landmark: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

12 visible links have no text or label, so screen readers cannot say where they go.

2 form fields have no label, so screen readers announce an empty box and autofill guesses.

There is no <h1>, so neither visitors nor Google get a clear main headline.

Your title is only 6 characters: “ADWEEK”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

Your meta description is only 50 characters: “Breaking News in Advertising, Media and Technology”. 70 to 160 characters is enough to sell the click.

The homepage links to 133 pages on adweek.com and 16 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.

/contributor/mitchell-parton and /contributor/mark-stenberg use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

Your homepage links to 6 pages by a URL that isn't their canonical one, for example /vertical/agencies, whose canonical is /agencies. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

/vertical/agencies, /vertical/brand-marketing, /vertical/creativity, /vertical/media, /vertical/convergent-tv and /vertical/commerce have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

/subscription has under 150 words in the HTML. Thin pages rarely rank; if the text loads with JavaScript, crawlers that don't run it see even less.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 74 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 image failed to load on a phone, for example https://ams-pageview-public.s3.amazonaws.com/1x1-pixel.png?id=16fbc9821a86.

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

7 of 20 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

The page uses 1 deprecated browser API that will stop working in future browsers (“Attribution Reporting is deprecated and will be removed. See https://goo.gle/ps-status for details.”).

5 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “wp is not defined”.

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

Requests the notification permission on page load.

No Strict-Transport-Security header, so browsers may still try plain http first on a return visit.

No Content-Security-Policy header, the main browser-side defence against injected scripts.

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.

No Permissions-Policy header to switch off camera, microphone and location for embedded content.

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

adweek.com 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.

adweek.com'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.

Your homepage shows a street address but no LocalBusiness JSON-LD, so Google and AI assistants have to guess your address, hours and phone from the page text.

A local customer looking to call finds no phone number on the homepage. Add one, ideally as a tap-to-call link.

Social proof on the homepage: 1 testimonial or review block. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

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

The homepage shows no opening hours. If customers visit or call, show when.

There is no link to Google or Apple Maps. A directions link is one tap for a phone visitor.

No guarantee or risk reducer (money-back, free trial, no credit card) is mentioned, which is often what tips a hesitant visitor.

The homepage carries about 1,152 words of visible text.

DMARC is set to p=none, so mail pretending to be adweek.com is still delivered. Reports are on, so moving to quarantine is the next step.

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.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Amazon Ads, Criteo, Google Ads, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager and 5 mores (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (OneTrust) is installed; check it blocks these until visitors agree where the law requires it.

Opening the homepage sets 27 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 89 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.