ae.com website review

104 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (2.4 MB).

11 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 1.6 s.

A phone's processor spends 13.5 s on main-thread work while loading, 9.4 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

Your mobile performance score is 37 (desktop: 59). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

About 1.4 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page.

9 images could be 615 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 750 ms faster on a phone.

20 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 1.3 s. During a long task the page ignores taps.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Facebook, Wunderkind and TikTok and others), adding 1.1 MB and 824 ms of main-thread time.

About 93 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 600 ms faster on a phone.

The page has 2,448 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

Wunderkind costs a phone 160 ms of main-thread work and 309 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.

Polyfills for old browsers add 70 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

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.

Real visitors wait 557 ms for the page to respond to a tap (75th percentile). Good is under 200 ms.

The page becomes fully interactive after 45.8 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 4.3 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Visually, the page fills in at 13.0 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Your largest element takes 5.1 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s.

For real visitors the layout shifts by 0.22 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

Real visitors wait 873 ms for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

The first text or image appears after 2.8 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 521 ms to 544 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.1 s to 2.5 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 6.8 MB in 291 requests on a phone: scripts 3.7 MB (75), other files 1.4 MB (107) and images 1.1 MB (43). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

5 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example 20261008-aehp-denimweather-bg-sm at 1,368 px wide, shown at 390 px. Resized copies would save about 140 KiB.

1 image further down the page (58 KiB) download before anyone scrolls to it. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 1.93 g of CO₂e: 231.6 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

5 elements have a tabindex above 0, which scrambles the keyboard order.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 27 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

Elements with visible text labels do not have matching accessible names. (1 element).

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

Your meta description is 181 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

Structured data found (Organization and WebSite) but with 1 problem, for example “WebSite: missing name”.

No twitter:card tag. X falls back to Open Graph, which is set, so this is minor.

The homepage links to 166 pages on ae.com and 17 external pages.

/us/en/favorites is marked noindex but linked from your homepage. If it is meant to be found, remove the noindex.

/us/en/accessibility, /us/en/favorites, /us/en/c/women/ae-everyday-luxe-collection/brg_dyn_zqlvut09n5 and /us/en/c/womens/loungewear-pjs/family-pjs/brg_dyn_zj935righ4 all use the title “American Eagle Outfitters”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

/us/en/accessibility, /us/en/favorites, /us/en/c/women/new-arrivals/new-this-week/brg_dyn_al3qr05o2n, /us/en/c/women/ae-everyday-luxe-collection/brg_dyn_zqlvut09n5, /us/en/c/womens/loungewear-pjs/family-pjs/brg_dyn_zj935righ4 and /us/en/p/women/jeans/baggy-wide-leg-jeans/ae-low-rise-cozy-baggy-jean/0437_6438_992 use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

Your homepage links to 1 page by a URL that isn't its canonical one, for example /us/en/c/women/featured/peanuts-shop/cat3130013, whose canonical is /us/en/c/women/featured/the-snoopy-friends-shop/cat3130013. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

/us/en/accessibility has no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 115 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

19 of 31 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

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

The page uses 3 deprecated browser APIs that will stop working in future browsers (“Synchronous `XMLHttpRequest` on the main thread is deprecated because of its detrimental effects to…”).

5 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET”.

3 images are displayed at the wrong aspect ratio, so they look stretched or squashed.

Large scripts ship without source maps.

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

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.

X-XSS-Protection is set to “1; mode=block”; the header is deprecated and can introduce bugs. Use 0 or remove it.

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

ae.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.

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.

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 256 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.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixel, Pinterest Tag and Reddit Pixel and 3 mores (measured from a US location before any click). No consent tool was detected. Visitors from the EU, UK and several US states must be asked first.

Opening the homepage sets 47 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 45 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.