ahern.com website review

8 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 2.2 s.

About 260 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 1.2 s faster on a phone.

7 images could be 655 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 800 ms faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 62 (desktop: 88). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

19 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (208 KiB).

About 49 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 220 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.

5 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Optanon and JSDelivr CDN and others), adding 579 KiB and 305 ms of main-thread time.

2 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 177 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 50 ms).

The HTML itself could arrive sooner: redirects, a slow server response or missing compression delay everything after it.

Desktop scores 88 but mobile only 62. A gap that wide usually means heavy scripts and images that hit phones hardest.

Polyfills for old browsers add 9 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.

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 11.9 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “RENT EQUIPMENT & TOOLS SEARCH”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 12.0 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 6.6 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The first text or image appears after 3.4 s on a phone. 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.

1 image 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' largest content (lcp) went from 2.0 s to 2.0 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 2.3 MB in 35 requests on a phone: images 1.5 MB (10), scripts 530 KiB (8) and fonts 132 KiB (2). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

Category-Aerial.jpg 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).

5 images (241 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.

1 image further down the page (23 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 0.65 g of CO₂e: 77.8 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

Page should contain a level-one heading: 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.

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

No meta description, so Google writes its own snippet from whatever text it finds.

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

Your title is only 20 characters: “Home | Ahern Rentals”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

No structured data (JSON-LD), so Google can't show rich results such as your logo, ratings or FAQs.

No Open Graph image (also missing: og:title, og:description), so links shared on LinkedIn, Slack or Facebook show no preview picture.

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

2 links use generic text like “click here” or “learn more”, which tells Google nothing about the page behind them.

No twitter:card tag. X falls back to Open Graph, which is incomplete here.

The homepage links to 68 pages on ahern.com and 18 external pages.

There is no Organization (or LocalBusiness) JSON-LD, so search engines and AI assistants have no machine-readable facts about who runs the site: its name, logo, profiles and contact details.

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.

Your homepage links to /rent, which answers with an error. Visitors hit a dead end and search engines drop it.

/contact has no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

/contact took over 3 s to send its HTML from our server.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 35 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 link from your homepage to your own site is broken, for example https://www.ahern.com/rent (network).

1 link to other sites is dead, for example https://www.linkedin.com/company/ahern-rentals-inc/ (404).

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.

The server only offers HTTP/1.1, so browsers open several connections and load files more slowly. Most hosts and CDNs turn on HTTP/2 with a setting.

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.

ahern.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.

ahern.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.

The homepage has only about 207 words of visible text; thin pages give Google and first-time buyers little to go on.

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

DMARC is set to p=none, so mail pretending to be ahern.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 Google Ads, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager (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 3 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 8 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.