crosswordsolver.com website review

About 839 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 3.9 s faster on a phone.

21 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (318 KiB).

Your mobile performance score is 37 (desktop: 90). 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, Facebook and Google/Doubleclick Ads and others), adding 1.4 MB and 1.3 s of main-thread time.

Polyfills for old browsers add 46 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 450 ms faster on a phone.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 418 ms of main-thread work and 455 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.

Facebook costs a phone 354 ms of main-thread work and 212 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 3.6 s on main-thread work while loading, 1.7 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

4 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 300 ms.

16 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 280 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

About 15 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.

1 image could be 16 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

Desktop scores 90 but mobile only 37. A gap that wide usually means heavy scripts and images that hit phones hardest.

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.

Your largest element takes 13.5 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “Get instant crossword help for any clue or cryptic puzzle o…”.

The first text or image appears after 6.1 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 17.6 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 7.7 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 882 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Real visitors wait 271 ms for the page to respond to a tap (75th percentile). Good is under 200 ms.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 177 ms to 189 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 1.9 s to 1.8 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.53 g of CO₂e: 63.3 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

9 buttons have no accessible name, so screen readers announce just “button”.

6 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: 24 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

The page has no <main> landmark, so screen-reader users cannot jump straight to the content.

1 frame has no title, so screen-reader users cannot tell what it contains.

1 visible link has no text or label, so screen readers cannot say where it goes.

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

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

Structured data found (WebSite) but with 1 problem, for example “WebSite: missing name”.

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

1 link has no real href, so search engines can't follow it.

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

The homepage links to 179 pages on crosswordsolver.com and 1 external page.

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.

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

/wordle, /scrabble-word-finder, /anagram-solver, /words-with-friends-cheat and /word have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 159 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

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

5 of 17 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

5 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Access to fetch at 'https://api.rlcdn.com/api/identity/envelope?pid=107' from origin 'https://www.crosswordsolver.com' …”.

1 image is displayed at the wrong aspect ratio, so it looks stretched or squashed.

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

2 links from your homepage to your own site are broken, for example https://www.crosswordsolver.com/clue/BRAIN-POWDER (410).

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.

HSTS is set, but max-age is 182 days; one year is the recommended minimum.

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.

crosswordsolver.com is registered until Dec 2026. Make sure auto-renew is on and the card on file is current.

crosswordsolver.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.

crosswordsolver.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.

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 719 words of visible text.

crosswordsolver.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.

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 Amazon Ads, Criteo, Google Ads, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager and 4 mores (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 18 cookies, 1 of them by other companies (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 68 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.