deadline.com website review

Your mobile performance score is 47. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

A phone's processor spends 9.4 s on main-thread work while loading, 5.6 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Ad Lightning, Google/Doubleclick Ads and Optanon and others), adding 2.5 MB and 2.0 s of main-thread time.

179 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (1.8 MB).

About 1,024 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page.

Google/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 555 ms of main-thread work and 867 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.

Ad Lightning costs a phone 555 ms of main-thread work and 248 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 253 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Optanon costs a phone 196 ms of main-thread work and 323 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.

The page has 2,101 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

blogherads.com costs a phone 137 ms of main-thread work and 569 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 Tag Manager costs a phone 137 ms of main-thread work and 308 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.

9 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 250 ms.

8 images could be 196 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

Polyfills for old browsers add 153 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

About 96 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.

3 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

The page becomes fully interactive after 54.6 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 12.0 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 1.2 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Your largest element takes 4.4 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Contenders London 2026 logo”.

The first text or image appears after 3.0 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.5 s to 1.5 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 5.5 MB in 1,079 requests on a phone: scripts 3.7 MB (178), other files 792 KiB (533) and images 507 KiB (261). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 1.55 g of CO₂e: 185.9 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

23 elements hidden from screen readers can still receive keyboard focus.

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

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 5 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Landmarks should have a unique role or role/label/title (i.e. accessible name) combination: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

Headings skip levels (h1 → h3), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

There are 2 <h1> headlines (“deadline-logo-svg Deadline” and “deadline-logo-svg Deadline”). One clear main headline is easier for people and search engines.

The homepage links to 241 pages on deadline.com and 128 external pages.

Your robots.txt shuts out ChatGPT search (OAI-SearchBot), ChatGPT (ChatGPT-User) and Perplexity (PerplexityBot). These fetch pages to answer people's questions and cite the source, so your site can't be quoted or linked in those answers.

Your Organization JSON-LD is missing sameAs (social profiles), description and contact details. These are the facts AI assistants use to describe a business and to tell it apart from others with a similar name.

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.

/tip-line, /p/awards-season, /h/political-news, /video, /p/events-hub and /p/contenders-television-documentary-unscripted-2026 and 1 other have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

/v/tv, /v/film, /p/awards-season, /v/box-office, /v/business and /v/international and 5 others have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

/h/political-news, /p/events-hub, /p/contenders-television-documentary-unscripted-2026 and /p/contenders-television-2026 have 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 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 127 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

10 images failed to load on a phone, for example https://deadline.com/.

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

18 of 54 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

The page uses 2 deprecated browser APIs that will stop working in future browsers (“The Topics API is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.”).

6 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Error: <svg> attribute viewBox: Expected number, "0 0 NaN NaN".”.

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

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.

deadline.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.

deadline.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.

Social proof on the homepage: 2 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.

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 1,134 words of visible text.

DMARC is set to p=none, so mail pretending to be deadline.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 Amazon Ads, Comscore, Criteo, Google Ads and Google Analytics and 5 mores (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (OneTrust) is installed; check it blocks these until visitors agree where the law requires it.

Opening the homepage sets 34 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 95 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.