cogstate.com website review

27 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 2.6 s.

6 images could be 829 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 600 ms).

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 284 ms of main-thread work and 363 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.

7 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Google CDN and Google Analytics and others), adding 488 KiB and 368 ms of main-thread time.

48 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (183 KiB).

About 235 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page.

3 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 111 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

About 13 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

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.

Real visitors see the first content after 3.1 s (75th percentile). Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 1.9 s for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

Real visitors wait 3.4 s for the largest content to appear (75th percentile). Good is under 2.5 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 5.7 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 6.4 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

The first text or image appears after 2.2 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.9 s to 2.8 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 2.2 MB in 75 requests on a phone: images 1.4 MB (21), scripts 694 KiB (29) and fonts 51 KiB (2). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

5 images (808 KiB) 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.

5 images further down the page (808 KiB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.61 g of CO₂e: 73.3 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

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

Links must have discernible text: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated serious by axe-core.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 13 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

6 links use generic text like “click here” or “learn more”, which tells Google nothing about the page behind them.

The homepage links to 97 pages on cogstate.com and 7 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.

/academic-research took over 3 s to send its HTML from our server.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 43 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

3 of 11 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

2 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Error with Permissions-Policy header: Parse of permissions policy failed because of errors reported by structured heade…”.

No testimonials, customer logos, ratings or customer counts on the homepage: nothing tells a new visitor that others already trust you.

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 523 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads 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 5 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 12 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.