covers.com website review

42 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (718 KiB).

About 763 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.5 s faster on a phone.

The page has 5,641 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Cookiebot, Google CDN and Facebook and others), adding 1.3 MB and 1.1 s of main-thread time.

Your mobile performance score is 50 (desktop: 73). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

3 images could be 146 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 650 ms faster on a phone.

2 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 550 ms.

Cookiebot costs a phone 416 ms of main-thread work and 42 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.

A phone's processor spends 3.8 s on main-thread work while loading, 1.9 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

Google CDN costs a phone 276 ms of main-thread work and 733 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.

About 96 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.

Polyfills for old browsers add 20 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

14 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

16 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 143 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

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.

The first text or image appears after 10.6 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 15.6 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “sponsorship banner background”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 23.0 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 10.6 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 271 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.8 s to 1.6 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 3.3 MB in 199 requests on a phone: scripts 1.8 MB (54), other files 571 KiB (43) and images 432 KiB (80). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

1 image is downloaded at several times the size a phone draws it, for example bg-sm.png at 1,770 px wide, shown at 364 px. Resized copies would save about 71 KiB.

1 image (115 KiB) is 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 0.94 g of CO₂e: 112.8 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

1 element use ARIA attributes their role does not allow, which confuses screen readers.

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

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

14 images have no alt text, which hurts accessibility and image search.

Alternative text of images should not be repeated as text: 11 elements on the page fail this check, rated minor by axe-core.

ARIA role should be appropriate for the element: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated minor by axe-core.

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

61 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 979 pages on covers.com and 56 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.

/sports/nfl/matchups, /picks/nfl, /sports/ncaaf/matchups, /picks/ncaaf and /sports/nba/matchups have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

/sport/ncaaf/weather took over 3 s to send its HTML from our server.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 199 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

30 of 86 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

The page uses 1 deprecated browser API that will stop working in future browsers (“Synchronous `XMLHttpRequest` on the main thread is deprecated because of its detrimental effects to…”).

1 third-party cookie is set on load; browsers are restricting these, so whatever relies on them breaks.

1 error was logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Loading the script 'https://scripts.clarity.ms/0.8.75-beta/clarity.js' violates the following Content Security Policy d…”.

3 images are served at too low a resolution for sharp phone screens.

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

1 link to other sites is dead, for example https://contests.covers.com/consensus/pickleaders/all?orderPickBy=Overall&orderBy=Units (500).

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

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.

covers.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.

Your homepage shows a street address but no LocalBusiness JSON-LD, so Google and AI assistants have to guess your address, hours and phone from the page text.

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: 3 trust badges. 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 form on the homepage, so every lead has to click through to another page first.

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

The homepage carries about 3,195 words of visible text.

DMARC is set to p=none, so mail pretending to be covers.com is still delivered. Reports are on, so moving to quarantine is the next step.

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 Ads, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixel, Microsoft Clarity and Quantcast (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (Cookiebot) 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.