chefsteps.com website review

46 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (71.3 MB).

16 images could be 21.5 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 19.9 s faster on a phone.

About 894 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 4.8 s faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 38. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Optanon, Google Tag Manager and Forter and others), adding 83.3 MB and 286 ms of main-thread time.

foodthinkers.com costs a phone 0 ms of main-thread work and 82.5 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.

1 file blocks the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining it could save about 800 ms.

About 156 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 600 ms faster on a phone.

8 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 330 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

A phone's processor spends 3.1 s on main-thread work while loading, 1.7 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

Polyfills for old browsers add 59 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

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.

Your largest element takes 257.7 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “cs3.0onions.jpg”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 275.8 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 11.8 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The first text or image appears after 4.2 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 793 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 162 ms to 162 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 85.1 MB in 121 requests on a phone: images 74.2 MB (41), other files 8.5 MB (47) and scripts 1.9 MB (26). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

23 images weigh 68.1 MB together. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

24 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example sous-vide-steak__thumbnail-image.jpg at 9,027 px wide, shown at 230 px. Resized copies would save about 66.2 MB.

25 images (68.4 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.

cs30onions.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 24.12 g of CO₂e: 2894.5 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

5 elements have a tabindex above 0, which scrambles the keyboard order.

Headings skip levels (h1 → h3, h3 → h6 and h2 → h6), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

Your title is only 9 characters: “ChefSteps”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

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

There are 2 <h1> headlines (“” and “”). 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 twitter:card tag. X falls back to Open Graph, which is set, so this is minor.

The homepage links to 27 pages on chefsteps.com and 0 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.

/, /recipes, /guides-tools, /classes, /landing/joule-turbo and /recipes/the-ultimate-guide-to-chocolate-chip-cookies-when-average-equals-amazing and 10 others all use the title “ChefSteps”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

/recipes, /guides-tools and /landing/joule-turbo use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

/recipes/the-ultimate-guide-to-chocolate-chip-cookies-when-average-equals-amazing, /recipes/bulletproof-beurre-monte, /recipes/sous-vide-steak, /recipes/rich-and-moist-cornbread, /recipes/potato-pave and /recipes/chicken-liver-pate and 5 others 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 26 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 error was logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Minified React error #418; visit https://reactjs.org/docs/error-decoder.html?invariant=418 for the full message or use …”.

Chrome logged issues while loading the page (“Content security policy”).

Large scripts ship without source maps.

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

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.

chefsteps.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.

chefsteps.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 phone number or email link on the homepage, so ready-to-buy visitors have one fewer way to reach you.

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

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 580 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 Tag Manager (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 5 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 14 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.