gutenberg.org website review

30 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (498 KiB).

20 images could be 331 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 750 ms faster on a phone.

1 file blocks the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining it could save about 250 ms.

About 14 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

6 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

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.

Real visitors see the first content after 2.0 s (75th percentile). Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 1.2 s for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

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 95 ms to 93 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

1 image is downloaded at several times the size a phone draws it, for example pg-logo-new.jpg at 576 px wide, shown at 96 px. Resized copies would save about 42 KiB.

3 images (119 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.

6 images further down the page (152 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 0.14 g of CO₂e: 16.8 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

No XML sitemap at https://www.gutenberg.org/sitemap.xml, so Google discovers your pages only by following links.

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

The homepage links to 69 pages on gutenberg.org and 13 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.

/ebooks/categories and /ebooks/bookshelf all use the title “Bookshelf | Project Gutenberg”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

/donate, /about, /help/reading_options.html, /about/contact_information.html, /about/background and /help and 5 others use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

Your homepage links to 1 page by a URL that isn't its canonical one, for example /ebooks/categories, whose canonical is /ebooks/categories.html. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

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

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 48 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

2 links to other sites are dead, for example https://bsky.app/profile/gutenberg.org (404).

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

Neither X-Frame-Options nor a CSP frame-ancestors policy is set, so any site can embed yours in a frame.

HSTS is set, but max-age is 90 days; one year is the recommended minimum.

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.

gutenberg.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.

gutenberg.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.

Social proof on the homepage: 1 trust badge. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

No analytics or tag manager detected in the HTML, so you can't measure whether any of these fixes work.

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 510 words of visible text.

gutenberg.org has no DMARC record, so nothing tells receivers what to do with mail that fails SPF or DKIM. Gmail and Yahoo require DMARC from bulk senders.

gutenberg.org 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.

We found no DKIM key on the selectors the big email providers use. If you send through one of them, turning on DKIM signing improves delivery.

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.

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.