chess.com website review

A phone's processor spends 5.2 s on main-thread work while loading, 2.4 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

About 447 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 900 ms faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 50 (desktop: 77). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

193 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (357 KiB).

20 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 610 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

16 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 600 ms.

About 33 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

Optanon costs a phone 245 ms of main-thread work and 437 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.

4 third-party services load with your homepage (Optanon, cloudflare.com and Sentry and others), adding 501 KiB and 258 ms of main-thread time.

44 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

1 image could be 37 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

Desktop scores 77 but mobile only 50. A gap that wide usually means heavy scripts and images that hit phones hardest.

Polyfills for old browsers add 9 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

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.

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.

The page becomes fully interactive after 15.6 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Your largest element takes 6.1 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 1.5 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Real visitors see the first content after 2.0 s (75th percentile). Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 998 ms for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

The first text or image appears after 2.3 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 237 ms to 228 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 3.5 s to 3.4 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 3.0 MB in 215 requests on a phone: scripts 1.9 MB (154), media 440 KiB (1) and images 254 KiB (20). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

bots_1786350154615.svg 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 0.84 g of CO₂e: 100.6 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

1 button has no accessible name, so screen readers announce just “button”.

8 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.

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

The homepage links to 38 pages on chess.com and 8 external pages.

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.

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

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

/play, /puzzles, /learn, /train, /login_and_go and /play/computer have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

/play, /puzzles, /learn, /train, /community and /login_and_go and 2 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 28 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

10 images failed to load on a phone, for example https://www.chess.com/.

1 error was logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: net::ERR_FAILED”.

Large scripts ship without source maps.

1 link from your homepage to your own site is broken, for example https://www.chess.com/TEMPLATE (404).

1 link go through two or more redirects, for example https://chess.com/support.

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.

chess.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.

chess.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.

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

The homepage has only about 176 words of visible text; thin pages give Google and first-time buyers little to go on.

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.

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.

Opening the homepage sets 11 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 5 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.