dictionary.com website review

181 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (2.4 MB).

About 2.3 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 8.4 s faster on a phone.

2 images could be 252 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.

A phone's processor spends 14.6 s on main-thread work while loading, 8.5 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

script.ac costs a phone 1.2 s of main-thread work and 97 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 33 (desktop: 36). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (script.ac, anyclip.com and Amazon Ads and others), adding 3.2 MB and 3.1 s of main-thread time.

3 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 600 ms.

20 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 560 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

anyclip.com costs a phone 411 ms of main-thread work and 774 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.

Amazon Ads costs a phone 335 ms of main-thread work and 551 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/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 285 ms of main-thread work and 530 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.

Rubicon Project costs a phone 258 ms of main-thread work and 95 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.

Polyfills for old browsers add 83 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 200 ms faster on a phone.

About 51 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

18 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

Critical files load one after another instead of in parallel (3 chains). Preconnecting to key origins and preloading the hero image shortens the chain.

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 26.3 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the element shown below.

Visually, the page fills in at 17.4 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 66.2 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 2.5 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Real visitors wait 258 ms for the page to respond to a tap (75th percentile). Good is under 200 ms.

The first text or image appears after 2.6 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 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 180 ms to 214 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 1.6 s to 1.8 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 6.7 MB in 1,431 requests on a phone: scripts 4.5 MB (138), other files 1,014 KiB (557) and HTML 598 KiB (244). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

1 image is downloaded at several times the size a phone draws it, for example 28-football-terms-to-make-you-sound-like-a-pro-20261005.jpg at 1,920 px wide, shown at 306 px. Resized copies would save about 192 KiB.

1 image (249 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 1.89 g of CO₂e: 226.5 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

1 image has no alt text, which hurts accessibility and image search.

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

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

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

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

The homepage links to 30 pages on dictionary.com and 26 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, 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, which the crawlers above handle.

/word-of-the-day has no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 23 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 image failed to load on a phone, for example https://partner.mediawallahscript.com/?account_id=1009&partner_id=0234c510&uid=&custom=&tag_format=img&tag_action=sync.

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

The page uses 1 deprecated browser API that will stop working in future browsers (“The Topics API is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.”).

5 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: net::ERR_FAILED”.

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

1 link from your homepage to your own site is broken, for example https://www.dictionary.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection (404).

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.

dictionary.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.

dictionary.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: 10 customer or partner logos. 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 has only about 209 words of visible text; thin pages give Google and first-time buyers little to go on.

No guarantee or risk reducer (money-back, free trial, no credit card) is mentioned, which is often what tips a hesitant visitor.

Your SPF record doesn't end in -all or ~all, so it doesn't stop other servers sending as you: “v=spf1 redirect=dictionary.com.hosted.spf-report.com”.

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 20 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 107 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.