better.com website review

59 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (1.5 MB).

About 930 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.5 s faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 36 (desktop: 36). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

A phone's processor spends 5.7 s on main-thread work while loading, 3.7 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Google Maps and Facebook and others), adding 1.5 MB and 1.5 s of main-thread time.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 800 ms of main-thread work and 573 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.

3 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 500 ms.

19 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 289 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Google Maps costs a phone 170 ms of main-thread work and 392 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 63 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

3 images could be 28 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

About 19 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

6 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

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.

For real visitors the layout shifts by 0.77 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

Your largest element takes 14.6 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “Betsy AI gets you cash from your home cheaper, faster, and …”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 23.6 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 1.3 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Visually, the page fills in at 7.9 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The first text or image appears after 3.5 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 3.0 s for the largest content to appear (75th percentile). Good is under 2.5 s.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 155 ms to 174 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.9 s to 2.2 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 2.8 MB in 172 requests on a phone: scripts 2.2 MB (57), fonts 439 KiB (8) and other files 74 KiB (79). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.79 g of CO₂e: 94.6 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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.

The homepage links to 56 pages on better.com and 2 external pages.

A phone browser shows 1,046 words, but the HTML your server sends has only 167. GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot read that HTML without running JavaScript, so they see an almost empty page. Server-side rendering or pre-rendering fixes it.

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.

/heloc-vs-cashout-refi-calculator has no <title>, so Google invents the link text in results.

/preapproval/nxt-purchase, /preapproval/nxt-refinance and /preapproval/nxt-heloc all use the title “Better Mortgage”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

/heloc-vs-cashout-refi-calculator has no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

/preapproval/nxt-purchase, /preapproval/nxt-refinance and /preapproval/nxt-heloc use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

/preapproval/nxt-purchase, /preapproval/nxt-refinance, /preapproval/nxt-heloc and /heloc-vs-cashout-refi-calculator have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

/preapproval/nxt-purchase, /preapproval/nxt-refinance and /preapproval/nxt-heloc 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 22 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

The page uses 1 deprecated browser API that will stop working in future browsers (“Unload event listeners are deprecated and will be removed.”).

Large scripts ship without source maps.

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

X-XSS-Protection is set to “1”; 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.

better.com is registered until Nov 2026. If it lapses, the site and its email stop working and someone else can buy the name. Renew it, and turn on auto-renew.

better.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.

better.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.

There is no form on the homepage, so every lead has to click through to another page first.

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 1,046 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 FullStory (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (TrustArc) is installed; check it blocks these until visitors agree where the law requires it.

Opening the homepage sets 5 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.