courant.com website review

26 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 4.5 s.

A phone's processor spends 22.8 s on main-thread work while loading, 14.5 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

Your mobile performance score is 15. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, cloudfront.net and Osano CMP and others), adding 3.4 MB and 4.9 s of main-thread time.

About 2.8 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 450 ms faster on a phone.

173 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (2.2 MB).

23 images could be 1.3 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 350 ms faster on a phone.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 955 ms of main-thread work and 725 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.

cloudfront.net costs a phone 831 ms of main-thread work and 79 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.

Osano CMP costs a phone 812 ms of main-thread work and 112 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.

Google/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 618 ms of main-thread work and 712 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.

mmvideocdn.com costs a phone 481 ms of main-thread work and 767 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.

20 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 343 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

The page has 1,572 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

Polyfills for old browsers add 141 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

14 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

About 11 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.

Visually, the page fills in at 25.0 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 71.7 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Your largest element takes 8.6 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Antonietta Roy, left, leaves U.S. District Court in Bridgep…”.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 3.1 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

The first text or image appears after 4.8 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 2.8 s for the largest content to appear (75th percentile). Good is under 2.5 s.

For real visitors the layout shifts by 0.24 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

Real visitors see the first content after 2.7 s (75th percentile). Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 1.7 s for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

The layout shifts by 0.244 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

5 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 2.6 s to 2.7 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 10.9 MB in 1,114 requests on a phone: scripts 6.3 MB (173), images 3.1 MB (320) and other files 545 KiB (522). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

001_260920_Top-Workplaces-COVER.pdf-2.jpg weighs 539 KiB. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

5 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example 001_260920_Top-Workplaces-COVER.pdf-2.jpg at 3,272 px wide, shown at 195 px. Resized copies would save about 714 KiB.

20 images further down the page (1.3 MB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

11 images (480 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.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 3.08 g of CO₂e: 369.3 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Images must have alternative text: 14 elements on the page fail this check, rated critical by axe-core.

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

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Page should contain a level-one heading: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

1 form field has no label, so screen readers announce an empty box and autofill guesses.

Your title is 101 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “Your source for Connecticut breaking news, UConn sports, business, entertainment, weather…”.

There are 2 <h1> headlines (“Hartford Courant” and “”). One clear main headline is easier for people and search engines.

Your meta description is 282 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

2 links have no real href, so search engines can't follow them.

No twitter:card tag. X falls back to Open Graph, which is set, so this is minor.

The homepage links to 197 pages on courant.com and 59 external pages.

Your robots.txt shuts out ChatGPT search (OAI-SearchBot), ChatGPT (ChatGPT-User), Claude search (Claude-SearchBot), Claude (Claude-User), 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.

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 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.

/util-clean-cookies, /news, /latest-headlines, /news/connecticut-news and /espanol have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

/util-clean-cookies has no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

/util-clean-cookies has 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.

/news/connecticut-news and /espanol took over 3 s to send their HTML from our server.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 121 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

3 images failed to load on a phone, for example https://rtb.mfadsrvr.com/sync?ssp=revcontent&ssp_user_id=a2b7a46422474a339b6d83fd5cf6bf60&gpp=DBACOe~CQs5qwAQs5qwAEX1WAENC2FgAAAAAEPgACiQAAAUlgIgAVAA4ACQAGgARQAmABoAEcAK0AZYBAACDgLzAaKA5YB8YFJQAAAA.IK.

23 third-party cookies are set on load; browsers are restricting these, so whatever relies on them breaks.

The page uses 2 deprecated browser APIs that will stop working in future browsers (“Unload event listeners are deprecated and will be removed.”).

6 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Sailthru is not defined”.

Large scripts ship without source maps.

Chrome logged issues while loading the page (“Cookie”).

Requests the notification permission on page load.

No Strict-Transport-Security header, so browsers may still try plain http first on a return visit.

Neither X-Frame-Options nor a CSP frame-ancestors policy is set, so any site can embed yours in a frame.

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

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

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.

courant.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.

courant.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.

A local customer looking to call finds no phone number on the homepage. Add one, ideally as a tap-to-call link.

Social proof on the homepage: 6 testimonial or review blocks. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

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

The homepage shows no opening hours. If customers visit or call, show when.

There is no link to Google or Apple Maps. A directions link is one tap for a phone visitor.

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 1,431 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 Amazon Ads, Comscore, Criteo, Google Ads and Google Analytics and 3 mores (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (Osano) is installed; check it blocks these until visitors agree where the law requires it.

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

Loading the homepage contacts 91 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.