cover.com website review

5 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 2.8 s.

59 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (8.6 MB).

14 images could be 3.5 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

Your mobile performance score is 83 (desktop: 98). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

About 43 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, jQuery CDN and JSDelivr CDN and others), adding 331 KiB and 102 ms of main-thread time.

About 98 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page.

2 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 61 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 50 ms).

Critical files load one after another instead of in parallel (3 chains). Preconnecting to key origins and preloading the hero image shortens the chain.

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 first text or image appears after 3.5 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors see the first content after 1.9 s (75th percentile). Good is under 1.8 s.

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

Your largest element takes 3.5 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “Hi there, looking for insurance? We got you covered.”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 4.6 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 3.5 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-17, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 100 ms to 111 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-17, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.7 s to 1.9 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 9.0 MB in 77 requests on a phone: media 4.4 MB (1), images 4.0 MB (48) and fonts 321 KiB (7). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

4 images weigh 2.4 MB together. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

9 images (3.8 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.

9 images further down the page (3.8 MB) 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 2.56 g of CO₂e: 306.9 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

1 dropdown has no label.

1 text element doesn't have enough contrast against the background to read easily, especially outdoors on a phone.

3 form fields have no label, so screen readers announce an empty box and autofill guesses.

Alternative text of images should not be repeated as text: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated minor by axe-core.

Headings skip levels (h2 → h5, h3 → h5 and h3 → h5), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

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

No canonical URL, so duplicate versions of the homepage (with or without www, with tracking parameters) can split ranking signals.

No Open Graph image (also missing: og:title, og:description), so links shared on LinkedIn, Slack or Facebook show no preview picture.

No XML sitemap at https://cover.com/sitemap.xml, so Google discovers your pages only by following links.

There is no robots.txt at cover.com/robots.txt, the first file search crawlers ask for.

No twitter:card tag. X falls back to Open Graph, which is incomplete here.

The homepage links to 21 pages on cover.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.

/, /auto.html, /about-us.html, /privacy-policy.html, /terms-of-use.html and /ccpa-opt-out.html and 1 other all use the title “Cover - Compare Insurance Quotes for Free”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

/auto.html, /about-us.html, /privacy-policy.html, /terms-of-use.html, /ccpa-opt-out.html and /washington-mhmda-policy.html use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

We fetched 7 pages linked from your homepage and read each the way a search engine does.

1 image failed to load on a phone, for example https://forms.smartfinancial.com/sfanalytics/sfpxl?aid=&cid=&sid=undefined&tid=undefined&ks=&click_id=&gclid=&sub1=&ip_address=15.204.163.14&full_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcover.com%2F&uid=&referrer=&device=m.

2 of 8 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

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

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

No Content-Security-Policy header, the main browser-side defence against injected scripts.

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.

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.

cover.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.

cover.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.

On a phone, there is no call to action on the first screen: visitors have to scroll to find out what to do next.

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 1,161 words of visible text.

cover.com has no DMARC record, so nothing tells receivers what to do with mail that fails SPF or DKIM. Gmail and Yahoo require DMARC from bulk senders.

cover.com has no SPF record, so mail servers can't tell which servers may send email as you. Your mail lands in spam more often, and anyone can send mail pretending to be you.

We found no DKIM key on the selectors the big email providers use. If you send through one of them, turning on DKIM signing improves delivery.

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). No consent tool was detected. Visitors from the EU, UK and several US states must be asked first.

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