herringdesign.com website review

66 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (4.7 MB).

4 images could be 1.1 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 5.6 s faster on a phone.

18 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 2.6 s.

Your mobile performance score is 37. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

About 212 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 900 ms faster on a phone.

About 169 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.

6 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Cloudflare CDN and Google Analytics and others), adding 538 KiB and 155 ms of main-thread time.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 200 ms).

16 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

12 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

2 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 114 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

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.

Your largest element takes 24.9 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image.

The page becomes fully interactive after 25.1 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

The layout shifts by 0.826 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

Visually, the page fills in at 7.8 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The first text or image appears after 3.3 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

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

Chrome's UX Report (opens in a new tab) has too little real-visitor traffic for this site, so the figures here are lab measurements from Google's test phone on a throttled 4G connection.

Your homepage downloads 5.3 MB in 87 requests on a phone: images 4.3 MB (35), scripts 443 KiB (23) and fonts 293 KiB (9). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

4 images weigh 2.8 MB together. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

11 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example oneok-sr-1.jpg at 3,360 px wide, shown at 390 px. Resized copies would save about 2.8 MB.

11 images (4.1 MB) 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.

5 images further down the page (1.5 MB) 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 1.49 g of CO₂e: 178.8 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

1 tap target is too small or too close together to hit reliably with a finger.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 16 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

The viewport tag blocks pinch-zoom, which low-vision visitors rely on.

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

1 form field has no label, so screen readers announce an empty box and autofill guesses.

Headings skip levels (h1 → h3), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

No meta description, so Google writes its own snippet from whatever text it finds.

Your title is only 21 characters: “Home - Herring Design”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

There are 2 <h1> headlines (“Herring is a creative agency that shares stories …” and “Our clients”). One clear main headline is easier for people and search engines.

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

1 link has no real href, so search engines can't follow it.

The homepage links to 47 pages on herringdesign.com and 3 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 https://herringdesign.com/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.

https://herringdesign.com/about, https://herringdesign.com/work, https://herringdesign.com/news-story, https://herringdesign.com/contact, https://herringdesign.com/portfolio-posts/the-allen-branding and https://herringdesign.com/portfolio-posts/blue-mountain-midstream and 5 others have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

https://herringdesign.com/work has no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

https://herringdesign.com/about, https://herringdesign.com/work and https://herringdesign.com/contact 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 12 pages linked from your homepage and read each the way a search engine does.

On a phone, there is no call to action on the first screen: visitors have to scroll to find out what to do next.

The homepage has only about 68 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.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads 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 4 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 8 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.