elca.org website review

About 605 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.

4 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 1.9 s.

Your mobile performance score is 45 (desktop: 75). 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, Google CDN and website-files.com and others), adding 2.0 MB and 758 ms of main-thread time.

7 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (95 KiB).

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 421 ms of main-thread work and 523 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 52 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

website-files.com costs a phone 123 ms of main-thread work and 611 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 CDN costs a phone 128 ms of main-thread work and 355 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.

Adobe TypeKit costs a phone 10 ms of main-thread work and 451 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 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 229 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

3 images could be 154 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 50 ms).

Desktop scores 75 but mobile only 45. A gap that wide usually means heavy scripts and images that hit phones hardest.

Polyfills for old browsers add 8 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.

The first text or image appears after 8.2 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 17.7 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Congregants gathered for worship at an ELCA church”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 17.8 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 8.2 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 478 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 88 ms to 86 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.1 s to 1.2 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 2.5 MB in 67 requests on a phone: scripts 1.3 MB (16), fonts 688 KiB (23) and images 410 KiB (11). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

3 images (139 KiB) are 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 0.70 g of CO₂e: 83.8 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Headings skip levels (h4 → h6, h4 → h6 and h4 → h6), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

No structured data (JSON-LD), so Google can't show rich results such as your logo, ratings or FAQs.

Your meta description is 167 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

No Open Graph image, so links shared on LinkedIn, Slack or Facebook show no preview picture.

9 links use generic text like “click here” or “learn more”, which tells Google nothing about the page behind them.

The homepage links to 144 pages on elca.org and 39 external pages.

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.

/directory/congregations is marked noindex but linked from your homepage. If it is meant to be found, remove the noindex.

/ and /es all use the title “Discover the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America | ELCA”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

/directory/congregations, /directory, /utility/careers and /enhanced-search have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

/enhanced-search has no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

/directory 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 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 101 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

4 of 7 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

1 error was logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Cannot read properties of null (reading 'addEventListener')”.

Large scripts ship without source maps.

3 links to other sites are dead, for example https://community.elca.org/givenow (404).

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.

elca.org 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.

elca.org'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.

Your homepage shows a street address but no LocalBusiness JSON-LD, so Google and AI assistants have to guess your address, hours and phone from the page text.

The homepage shows no opening hours. If customers visit or call, show when.

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 1,353 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 7 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 17 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.