deadspin.com website review

A phone's processor spends 34.0 s on main-thread work while loading, 17.2 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

18 images could be 438 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.3 s faster on a phone.

Spot.IM costs a phone 1.2 s of main-thread work and 582 KiB of downloads while your page loads. That alone is enough to make taps feel slow. Loading it after the page is usable, or only on the pages that need it, takes that off the critical path.

PubNation costs a phone 1.1 s of main-thread work and 465 KiB of downloads while your page loads. That alone is enough to make taps feel slow. Loading it after the page is usable, or only on the pages that need it, takes that off the critical path.

Rubicon Project costs a phone 1.1 s of main-thread work and 100 KiB of downloads while your page loads. That alone is enough to make taps feel slow. Loading it after the page is usable, or only on the pages that need it, takes that off the critical path.

Google/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 1.1 s of main-thread work and 429 KiB of downloads while your page loads. That alone is enough to make taps feel slow. Loading it after the page is usable, or only on the pages that need it, takes that off the critical path.

Your mobile performance score is 35. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

The page has 4,099 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Spot.IM, PubNation and Rubicon Project and others), adding 2.5 MB and 7.1 s of main-thread time.

159 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (1.3 MB).

About 1.2 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page.

20 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 1.2 s. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Pubmatic costs a phone 820 ms of main-thread work and 99 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.

2 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 450 ms.

About 97 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

Polyfills for old browsers add 89 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

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.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 8.6 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

The page becomes fully interactive after 53.0 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Your largest element takes 8.3 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “CFP Committee Is Giving SEC Teams Too Much Credit for Losses”.

Visually, the page fills in at 11.1 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

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

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 98 ms to 116 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.1 s to 2.0 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 6.4 MB in 1,063 requests on a phone: scripts 3.3 MB (166), images 1.1 MB (232) and other files 876 KiB (507). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

1 image is downloaded at several times the size a phone draws it, for example cms-1793889062070-796898d2-6f0e-499b-9e90-e759e68f6c43.jpg at 900 px wide, shown at 144 px. Resized copies would save about 54 KiB.

7 images further down the page (194 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 1.81 g of CO₂e: 217.2 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

5 frames have no title, so screen-reader users cannot tell what they contain.

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.

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

The homepage links to 914 pages on deadspin.com and 6 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.

robots.txt blocks GPTBot 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, which the crawlers above handle.

/baseball, /prediction-markets/trending/mlb, /football, /prediction-markets/trending/nfl, /basketball and /prediction-markets/trending/nba and 4 others have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

/poker and /hockey took over 3 s to send their HTML from our server.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 196 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

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

The page uses 2 deprecated browser APIs that will stop working in future browsers (“Unload event listeners are deprecated and will be removed.”).

2 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 503 ()”.

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

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

No Permissions-Policy header to switch off camera, microphone and location for embedded content.

X-XSS-Protection is set to “1; mode=block”; the header is deprecated and can introduce bugs. Use 0 or remove it.

There is no /.well-known/security.txt telling researchers how to report a security problem to you.

deadspin.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.

deadspin.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 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.

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 1,711 words of visible text.

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 Analytics and 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.

Opening the homepage sets 2 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 18 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.