btn.com website review

16 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 2.0 s.

20 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (547 KiB).

2 images could be 305 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 1.1 s faster on a phone.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Cloudflare CDN and cloudfront.net and others), adding 1.4 MB and 1.3 s of main-thread time.

Your mobile performance score is 60. Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

About 487 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 360 ms of main-thread work and 603 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.

Cloudflare CDN costs a phone 313 ms of main-thread work and 84 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.

A phone's processor spends 2.4 s on main-thread work while loading, 1.4 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

transcend-cdn.com costs a phone 211 ms of main-thread work and 318 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 1,982 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

About 34 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

13 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 152 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 150 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.

4 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

Your largest element takes 6.0 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “9942”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 11.7 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

The first text or image appears after 2.5 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 4.5 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The layout shifts by 0.147 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 299 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

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

Chrome's UX Report (opens in a new tab) has too little real-visitor traffic for this site, so the figures here are lab measurements from Google's test phone on a throttled 4G connection.

1 image is downloaded at several times the size a phone draws it, for example image_handler.aspx at 1,920 px wide, shown at 358 px. Resized copies would save about 222 KiB.

1 image (324 KiB) is 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 0.56 g of CO₂e: 67.5 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

2 frames have no title, so screen-reader users cannot tell what they contain.

2 images have no alt text, which hurts accessibility and image search.

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.

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 structured data (JSON-LD), so Google can't show rich results such as your logo, ratings or FAQs.

Your meta description is only 53 characters: “The official athletics website for Big Ten Conference”. 70 to 160 characters is enough to sell the click.

There are 2 <h1> headlines (“Big Ten Conference” and “About Big Ten Network”). One clear main headline is easier for people and search engines.

No canonical URL, so duplicate versions of the homepage (with or without www, with tracking parameters) can split ranking signals.

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 http://bigten.org/sitemap.xml, so Google discovers your pages only by following links.

The homepage links to 8 pages on btn.com and 71 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.

robots.txt blocks CCBot, which collect pages to train models. That's a legitimate choice and doesn't by itself stop the site appearing in AI answers, which the crawlers above handle.

/sports/2026/7/15/Find%20BTN%20on%20TV.aspx, /btn_schedule.aspx and /sports/2026/7/15/Welcome%20to%20the%20BTN%20GameFinder.aspx have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

/, /sports/2026/7/15/Find%20BTN%20on%20TV.aspx, /sports/2026/7/15/Welcome%20to%20the%20BTN%20GameFinder.aspx and /archives.aspx 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 5 pages linked from your homepage and read each the way a search engine does.

8 of 26 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

3 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Uncaught TypeError: Cannot assign to read only property 'open' of object '#<Window>'”.

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

Does not redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS.

Your homepage is served without HTTPS, so browsers mark it “Not secure” and some refuse forms on it.

2 links to other sites are dead, for example http://foxcareers.com/ (500).

5 links go through two or more redirects, for example http://bigtenplus.com/.

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

bigten.org 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.

We found no call-to-action buttons or links (such as “Book a demo” or “Get a quote”) anywhere on the homepage.

No testimonials, customer logos, ratings or customer counts on the homepage: nothing tells a new visitor that others already trust 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 1,538 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 Comscore, Google Ads, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager (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 6 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 18 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.