hightower.design website review

About 798 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 4.3 s faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 34. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

The page has 7,132 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

A phone's processor spends 6.1 s on main-thread work while loading, 3.2 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Google CDN and Vimeo and others), adding 4.8 MB and 1.5 s of main-thread time.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 673 ms of main-thread work and 396 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.

11 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 700 ms.

Vimeo costs a phone 226 ms of main-thread work and 3.4 MB 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.

16 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 469 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Google CDN costs a phone 384 ms of main-thread work and 740 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.

15 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (107 KiB).

About 58 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.

9 images could be 192 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

Polyfills for old browsers add 18 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.

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.

For real visitors the layout shifts by 0.28 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

Your largest element takes 20.9 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the element shown below.

The page becomes fully interactive after 21.5 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 976 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Visually, the page fills in at 6.6 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The layout shifts by 0.26 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

Real visitors wait 2.9 s for the largest content to appear (75th percentile). Good is under 2.5 s.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-11-07, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.0 s to 2.0 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 8.3 MB in 304 requests on a phone: other files 3.9 MB (117), images 2.0 MB (99) and scripts 1.9 MB (61). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 2.35 g of CO₂e: 281.8 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

59 elements hidden from screen readers can still receive keyboard focus.

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

2 tap targets are too small or too close together to hit reliably with a finger.

Elements marked as presentational should be consistently ignored: 19 elements on the page fail this check, rated minor by axe-core.

2 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 (h2 → h4, h2 → h4 and h2 → h4), 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.

There are 2 <h1> headlines (“Make a Scene” and “Make a Scene”). One clear main headline is easier for people and search engines.

Your meta description is 314 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.

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

The homepage links to 290 pages on hightower.design and 262 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.

https://hightower.design/pages/family/ottomans and https://hightower.design/pages/family/stools use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

https://hightower.design/pages/family/lounge-chairs, https://hightower.design/pages/family/sofas, https://hightower.design/pages/family/bar-height-seating, https://hightower.design/pages/family/counter-height-seating, https://hightower.design/pages/family/chairs and https://hightower.design/pages/family/stacking-chairs and 9 others have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 139 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 image failed to load on a phone, for example https://bat.bing.com/action/0?ti=148010005&tm=gtm002&Ver=2&mid=f9aa1521-fada-4fb9-968a-e1a778c27753&bo=1&sid=58e7c000ddba11f185993dc03a921549&vid=58e7ef00ddba11f1bb62d1af35fb92dd&vids=1&msclkid=N&gtm_.

54 of 177 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

2 third-party cookies are set on load; browsers are restricting these, so whatever relies on them breaks.

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

3 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Error initializing managers Error: Endpoint key not set”.

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

Social proof on the homepage: 2 testimonial or review blocks. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

Your longest form asks for 10 fields (8 required). Every extra field lowers completion.

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 1,069 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, LinkedIn Insight and Microsoft Ads and 2 mores (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 17 cookies, 4 of them by other companies (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 27 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.