highwest.com website review

About 960 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 3.6 s faster on a phone.

20 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 4.0 s.

23 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (703 KiB).

Your mobile performance score is 39. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Optanon and Stripe and others), adding 1.6 MB and 1.3 s of main-thread time.

About 238 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 750 ms faster on a phone.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 560 ms of main-thread work and 449 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.

A phone's processor spends 3.4 s on main-thread work while loading, 1.9 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

9 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 310 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Optanon costs a phone 256 ms of main-thread work and 301 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.

Polyfills for old browsers add 55 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

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

10 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

7 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.

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

Your largest element takes 15.3 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “We support the fight against underage drinking and drunk dr…”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 18.8 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

The first text or image appears after 5.0 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 8.0 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 749 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 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 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 101 ms to 104 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.8 s to 1.6 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 4.2 MB in 250 requests on a phone: scripts 1.8 MB (84), other files 870 KiB (119) and images 755 KiB (9). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 1.18 g of CO₂e: 141.9 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

3 form fields have no label, so screen readers announce an empty box and autofill guesses.

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

Your meta description is 207 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

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

3 links have no real href, so search engines can't follow them.

Open Graph is missing og:title and og:description, so shared links fall back to guesses.

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

The homepage links to 59 pages on highwest.com and 25 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.

Your homepage links to /pages/whiskey-club-old, which answers with an error. Visitors hit a dead end and search engines drop it.

/pages/why-we-blend, /pages/limited-releases and /pages/member-portal have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

/pages/about-us, /pages/protect-the-west, /pages/why-we-blend, /pages/limited-releases, /pages/experience and /pages/distillery and 8 others have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

/pages/about-us, /pages/protect-the-west, /pages/why-we-blend, /pages/limited-releases, /pages/experience and /pages/distillery and 8 others 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 21 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

2 of 8 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

6 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Refused to apply style from 'https://highwest.com/cdn/shop/t/36/assets/the-prisoner.css?v=28949' because its MIME type …”.

1 image is displayed at the wrong aspect ratio, so it looks stretched or squashed.

1 link from your homepage to your own site is broken, for example https://highwest.com/pages/whiskey-club-old (404).

HSTS is set, but max-age is 91 days; one year is the recommended minimum.

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.

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.

highwest.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.

highwest.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.

No testimonials, customer logos, ratings or customer counts on the homepage: nothing tells a new visitor that others already trust you.

Your homepage shows a street address but no LocalBusiness JSON-LD, so Google and AI assistants have to guess your address, hours and phone from the page text.

A local customer looking to call finds no phone number on the homepage. Add one, ideally as a tap-to-call link.

No phone number or email link on the homepage, so ready-to-buy visitors have one fewer way to reach you.

The homepage has only about 243 words of visible text; thin pages give Google and first-time buyers little to go on.

There is no link to Google or Apple Maps. A directions link is one tap for a phone visitor.

No guarantee or risk reducer (money-back, free trial, no credit card) is mentioned, which is often what tips a hesitant visitor.

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, Klaviyo and Meta Pixel (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 20 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 42 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.