buzzfeed.com website review

Not measured in this review.

• Fails Core Web Vitals for real visitors

  Real Chrome users on phones do not pass Google's Core Web Vitals on your site (28-day field data from the Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab)). Google uses this in ranking.

• Real-user INP: 211 ms

  211 ms

  Real visitors wait 211 ms for the page to respond to a tap (75th percentile). Good is under 200 ms.

• Real-user CLS: 0.12

  0.12

  For real visitors the layout shifts by 0.12 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

• Tap response (INP) held steady for real visitors

  -8%

  Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 234 ms to 211 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

• Largest content (LCP) held steady for real visitors

  +7%

  Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.4 s to 1.5 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

• Page weight: 6.1 MB

  6.1 MB

  Your homepage downloads 6.1 MB on a phone, 2.7 MB of it images (45%). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

• 2 images over 500 KB

  2 images weigh 2.1 MB together. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

  Elements (2)

• 3 images far larger than shown

  2.3 MB

  3 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example pDLYh8IuQ.png at 1,920 px wide, shown at 169 px. Resized copies would save about 2.3 MB.

  Elements (3)

• 3 images in older formats

  3 images (2.5 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.

  Elements (3)

• About 1.7 g of CO₂ per visit

  1.73 g

  By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 1.73 g of CO₂e: 207.9 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

• Orphan list items

  Some list items are not inside a list.

  Elements (3)

• ARIA attributes must conform to valid values (42 elements)

  ARIA attributes must conform to valid values: 42 elements on the page fail this check, rated critical by axe-core.

  Elements (3)

• Delayed refresh under 20 hours must not be used (1 element)

  Delayed refresh under 20 hours must not be used: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated critical by axe-core.

  Elements (1)

• 2 text elements with low contrast

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

  Elements (2)

• 2 tap targets too small

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

  Elements (2)

• Landmarks should have a unique role or role/label/title (i.e. accessible name) combination (3 elements)

  Landmarks should have a unique role or role/label/title (i.e. accessible name) combination: 3 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

  Elements (3)

• Document should not have more than one banner landmark (1 element)

  Document should not have more than one banner landmark: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

  Elements (1)

• ARIA role should be appropriate for the element (42 elements)

  ARIA role should be appropriate for the element: 42 elements on the page fail this check, rated minor by axe-core.

  Elements (3)

• 5 links without text

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

  Elements (3)

• No H1 headline

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

• Title is short (8 characters)

  Your title is only 8 characters: “BuzzFeed”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

  View source

• No structured data

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

• Meta description is long (225 characters)

  Your meta description is 225 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

  View source

• 122 internal links, 5 external

  The homepage links to 122 pages on buzzfeed.com and 5 external pages.

• robots.txt blocks 2 AI answer engine crawlers

  2 of 6

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

• Most text only appears after JavaScript runs

  28%

  A phone browser shows 1,895 words, but the HTML your server sends has only 529. 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.

• No Organization structured data

  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.

• No llms.txt

  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.

• Opted out of AI training for 5 crawlers

  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.

• 1 linked page is broken

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

  Elements (1)

• 1 link to non-canonical URLs

  Your homepage links to 1 page by a URL that isn't its canonical one, for example /shopping, whose canonical is /shopping/shopping. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

  Elements (1)

• 3 pages without an H1

  /quizzes, /buzzchat and /topic/politics have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

• 2 pages with very little text

  /quizzes and /topic/politics 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.

• 15 internal pages checked

  We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 75 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

• 22 small tap targets

  22 of 47 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

• 3 JavaScript errors while loading

  3 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 ()”.

• 1 broken link to your own pages

  1 link from your homepage to your own site is broken, for example https://www.buzzfeed.com/newsletters?origin=navIcon (406).

• No X-Content-Type-Options

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

• No Referrer-Policy

  No Referrer-Policy header, so full URLs can leak to the sites you link to.

• No Permissions-Policy

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

• No CAA record

  buzzfeed.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.

• DNSSEC is off

  buzzfeed.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.

• Thin social proof

  Social proof on the homepage: 1 trust badge. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

• No analytics detected

  No analytics or tag manager detected in the HTML, so you can't measure whether any of these fixes work.

• No direct contact details

  No phone number or email link on the homepage, so ready-to-buy visitors have one fewer way to reach you.

• No form on the homepage

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

• No risk reducer

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

• About 1,895 words of copy

  The homepage carries about 1,895 words of visible text.

• Email authentication score: 90/100

  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.

• 6 trackers load before any consent

  6

  Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Amazon Ads, Comscore, Criteo, Google Ads and Meta Pixel and 1 more (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.

• 28 cookies set on arrival

  28

  Opening the homepage sets 28 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

• 66 other companies contacted

  Loading the homepage contacts 66 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.