elle.com website review

About 1.1 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.4 s faster on a phone.

3 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 1.6 s.

Your mobile performance score is 28 (desktop: 50). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

A phone's processor spends 8.3 s on main-thread work while loading, 5.5 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google/Doubleclick Ads, Google Tag Manager and Integral Ad Science and others), adding 2.0 MB and 1.7 s of main-thread time.

50 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (1.0 MB).

13 images could be 535 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

Google/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 435 ms of main-thread work and 751 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 406 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Polyfills for old browsers add 70 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 322 ms of main-thread work and 328 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.

Integral Ad Science costs a phone 259 ms of main-thread work and 113 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 1,544 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

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

14 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.

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 7.6 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 19.5 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “fall french girl shoe trends”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 39.7 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 14.6 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 1.8 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 130 ms to 142 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 1.5 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 368 requests on a phone: scripts 3.6 MB (153), images 666 KiB (57) and other files 477 KiB (133). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

1 image is downloaded at several times the size a phone draws it, for example da994a31-301f-48b0-8b8b-394ac9166d03.jpg at 292 px wide, shown at 96 px. Resized copies would save about 2 KiB.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 1.55 g of CO₂e: 185.7 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 7 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Elements with visible text labels do not have matching accessible names. (1 element).

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

Your title is 71 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “Fashion Magazine - Beauty Tips, Fashion Trends, & Celebrity News - ELLE”.

Your meta description is 241 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.

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

The homepage links to 135 pages on elle.com and 30 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.

/culture/career-politics, /offers/all-access-membership, /videos and /my-stuff all use the title “Client Challenge”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

/culture/career-politics, /offers/all-access-membership, /videos and /my-stuff have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

/culture/career-politics, /offers/all-access-membership, /videos and /my-stuff have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

/culture/career-politics, /offers/all-access-membership, /videos and /my-stuff 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 90 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

13 of 30 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

The page uses 1 deprecated browser API that will stop working in future browsers (“Unload event listeners are deprecated and will be removed.”).

1 third-party cookie is set on load; browsers are restricting these, so whatever relies on them breaks.

5 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “OptanonConsent does not exist”.

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

1 link go through two or more redirects, for example http://instagram.com/elleusa.

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.

elle.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.

elle.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.

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 1,139 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 Amazon Ads, Comscore, Criteo, Google Ads and Google Analytics and 4 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 41 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 76 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.