expressvpn.com website review

3 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (193 KiB).

Your mobile performance score is 78. Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

About 288 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 422 ms of main-thread work and 527 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 1,593 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

5 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Usercentrics CMP and Google Fonts and others), adding 614 KiB and 424 ms of main-thread time.

6 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 168 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

About 94 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

Scripts make the browser recalculate the layout repeatedly while the page loads, which wastes processor time on phones.

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.

The page becomes fully interactive after 8.0 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Your largest element takes 4.1 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Foreground Mobile 1”.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 160 ms to 210 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Real visitors wait 1.1 s for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

Visually, the page fills in at 4.4 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The first text or image appears after 2.2 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 240 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.32 g of CO₂e: 38.1 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

ARIA role should be appropriate for the element: 4 elements on the page fail this check, rated minor by axe-core.

Structured data found (FAQPage, VideoObject, WebPage and WebSite) but with 1 problem, for example “WebSite: missing name”.

No twitter:card tag. X falls back to Open Graph, which is set, so this is minor.

The homepage links to 226 pages on expressvpn.com and 11 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.

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

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 111 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 image is served at too low a resolution for sharp phone screens.

Large scripts ship without source maps.

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

1 link go through two or more redirects, for example https://go.expressvpn.com/c/16148/4080285/16063.

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.

expressvpn.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.

There is no form on the homepage, so every lead has to click through to another page first.

The homepage carries about 606 words of visible text.

expressvpn.com has no SPF record, so mail servers can't tell which servers may send email as you. Your mail lands in spam more often, and anyone can send mail pretending to be you.

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, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixel and Microsoft Ads (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (Usercentrics) is installed; check it blocks these until visitors agree where the law requires it.

Opening the homepage sets 15 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 16 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.