darrenmcardel.com website review

About 353 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.1 s faster on a phone.

2 images could be 393 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 1.4 s faster on a phone.

5 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 1.1 s.

Your mobile performance score is 55. Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

4 third-party services load with your homepage (Squarespace, sqspcdn.com and Adobe TypeKit and others), adding 1.5 MB and 702 ms of main-thread time.

Squarespace costs a phone 676 ms of main-thread work and 908 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 133 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 600 ms faster on a phone.

Polyfills for old browsers add 94 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

3 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 379 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

squarespace-cdn.com costs a phone 0 ms of main-thread work and 542 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.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 100 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.

Scripts make the browser recalculate the layout repeatedly while the page loads, which wastes processor time on phones.

Your largest element takes 10.3 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image.

The page becomes fully interactive after 10.3 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 6.7 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The first text or image appears after 2.6 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 403 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Chrome's UX Report (opens in a new tab) has too little real-visitor traffic for this site, so the figures here are lab measurements from Google's test phone on a throttled 4G connection.

2 images further down the page (224 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 0.44 g of CO₂e: 52.9 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

3 visible links have no text or label, so screen readers cannot say where they go.

No meta description, so Google writes its own snippet from whatever text it finds.

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

Your title is only 14 characters: “Darren McArdel”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

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

The homepage links to 10 pages on darrenmcardel.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 https://www.darrenmcardel.com/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.

https://www.darrenmcardel.com/rivet, https://www.darrenmcardel.com/ehyw and https://www.darrenmcardel.com/freshgrease have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

https://www.darrenmcardel.com/rivet 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.

We fetched 3 pages linked from your homepage and read each the way a search engine does.

2 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Access to XMLHttpRequest at 'https://static1.squarespace.com/static/versioned-site-css/5e977fbf6ce37c270721b70c/85/5c5a…”.

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

No analytics or tag manager detected in the HTML, so you can't measure whether any of these fixes work.

The homepage has only about 86 words of visible text; thin pages give Google and first-time buyers little to go on.

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.

Opening the homepage sets 3 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 7 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.