artforum.com website review

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

A phone's processor spends 15.3 s on main-thread work while loading, 8.8 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

Your mobile performance score is 19. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Ad Lightning, Google/Doubleclick Ads and Rubicon Project and others), adding 3.2 MB and 3.7 s of main-thread time.

195 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (2.5 MB).

About 1.5 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 750 ms faster on a phone.

Google/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 820 ms of main-thread work and 1.8 MB 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.

14 images could be 888 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

Ad Lightning costs a phone 838 ms of main-thread work and 400 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.

Rubicon Project costs a phone 472 ms of main-thread work and 93 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.

piano costs a phone 386 ms of main-thread work and 315 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 415 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

rhombusads.com costs a phone 333 ms of main-thread work and 126 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.

The page has 2,197 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

Polyfills for old browsers add 135 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

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

About 37 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

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.

3 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

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.

The page becomes fully interactive after 64.8 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 13.3 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 2.0 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

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 image “A black and white photo of a person in a baseball cap and d…”.

The layout shifts by 0.3 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

Real visitors see the first content after 1.9 s (75th percentile). Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 979 ms for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

The first text or image appears after 2.9 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-17, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.5 s to 2.4 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 7.6 MB in 1,173 requests on a phone: scripts 4.8 MB (194), images 1.7 MB (292) and other files 815 KiB (529). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

portrait.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).

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 2.17 g of CO₂e: 259.8 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

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

1 frame has no title, so screen-reader users cannot tell what it contains.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 47 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

The page has no <main> landmark, so screen-reader users cannot jump straight to the content.

Landmarks should have a unique role or role/label/title (i.e. accessible name) combination: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Page should contain a level-one heading: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

1 form field has 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 8 characters: “Artforum”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

Your meta description is 188 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

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

Open Graph is missing og:description, so shared links fall back to guesses.

The homepage links to 165 pages on artforum.com and 79 external pages.

Your robots.txt shuts out ChatGPT search (OAI-SearchBot), ChatGPT (ChatGPT-User) and Perplexity (PerplexityBot). These fetch pages to answer people's questions and cite the source, so your site can't be quoted or linked in those answers.

Your Organization JSON-LD is missing sameAs (social profiles), description and contact details. These are the facts AI assistants use to describe a business and to tell it apart from others with a similar name.

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.

robots.txt blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended and CCBot, which collect pages to train models. That's a legitimate choice and doesn't by itself stop the site appearing in AI answers.

/c/news, /c/columns, /c/features, /t/previews, /t/reviews and /videos and 8 others have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

/videos, /issue/2026/october-2026-1234741947 and /archive/2020-2030 have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 97 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

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

14 of 33 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

The page uses 2 deprecated browser APIs that will stop working in future browsers (“Unload event listeners are deprecated and will be removed.”).

6 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Uncaught (in promise) NotSupportedError: Failed to execute 'browsingTopics' on 'Document': document.browsingTopics() is…”.

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

HSTS is set, but max-age is 0 days; one year is the recommended minimum.

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

2 links go through two or more redirects, for example http://instagram.com/artforum.

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.

artforum.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.

artforum.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.

Social proof on the homepage: 8 testimonial or review blocks. 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.

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 829 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 Amazon Ads, Comscore, Criteo, Google Ads and Google Analytics and 3 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 30 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 74 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.