babylonbee.com website review

3 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 6.1 s.

25 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (967 KiB).

29 images could be 2.1 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 1.4 s faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 58 (desktop: 81). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

About 74 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 450 ms faster on a phone.

1 long task block the main thread while loading, the longest for 115 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).

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.

1 third-party service load with your homepage (JSDelivr CDN), adding 4 KiB and 1 ms of main-thread time.

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 12.6 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Article Header Image”.

The first text or image appears after 7.6 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 12.9 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 7.6 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Real visitors wait 845 ms for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

9 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' largest content (lcp) went from 1.5 s to 1.5 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 5.6 MB in 76 requests on a phone: images 4.4 MB (54), fonts 913 KiB (4) and scripts 181 KiB (14). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

40 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example 6ac934044ee1b6ac934044ee1c.jpg at 1,392 px wide, shown at 374 px. Resized copies would save about 2.2 MB.

38 images further down the page (3.7 MB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

31 images (3.2 MB) 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 1.59 g of CO₂e: 191.4 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

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

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 10 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Headings skip levels (h2 → h4), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

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

Your meta description is only 64 characters: “Babylon Bee is the definitive source of fake news you can trust.”. 70 to 160 characters is enough to sell the click.

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

There is no robots.txt at babylonbee.com/robots.txt, the first file search crawlers ask for.

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

The homepage links to 80 pages on babylonbee.com and 13 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.

/news, /videos, /app-search, /subscribe and /buzzing use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

/videos and /subscribe have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

/news, /videos, /app-search, /subscribe and /buzzing have 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 55 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 error was logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 503 ()”.

1 image is served at too low a resolution for sharp phone screens.

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

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

X-XSS-Protection is set to “1; mode=block, 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.

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

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 1,631 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 Analytics, Google Tag Manager and X (Twitter) Ads (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 9 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 14 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.