holts.com website review

About 1.0 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 6.0 s faster on a phone.

15 images could be 849 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.4 s faster on a phone.

35 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 3.1 s.

Your mobile performance score is 19 (desktop: 40). 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 CDN, Google Tag Manager and LiveChat and others), adding 2.2 MB and 1.3 s of main-thread time.

51 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (227 KiB).

Google CDN costs a phone 813 ms of main-thread work and 1.4 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.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 650 ms).

A phone's processor spends 3.4 s on main-thread work while loading, 2.0 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 224 ms of main-thread work and 297 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.

LiveChat costs a phone 72 ms of main-thread work and 366 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.

18 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 188 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

25 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

Polyfills for old browsers add 8 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.

2 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

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 0.56 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

Your largest element takes 19.8 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Weekly Special”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 23.8 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

The layout shifts by 0.961 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

Visually, the page fills in at 11.3 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The first text or image appears after 4.4 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

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

Real visitors wait 1.0 s for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 525 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-17, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 64 ms to 66 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-17, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 4.1 s to 3.9 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 4.5 MB in 140 requests on a phone: scripts 2.3 MB (62), images 1.4 MB (31) and other files 364 KiB (15). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

14 images (1.3 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.

3 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example mobile-sweepstakes-sitespot-blue.jpg at 1,500 px wide, shown at 390 px. Resized copies would save about 104 KiB.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 1.28 g of CO₂e: 153.7 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Images must have alternative text: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated critical by axe-core.

The page has no <main> landmark, so screen-reader users cannot jump straight to the content.

Page should contain a level-one heading: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

1 text element doesn't have enough contrast against the background to read easily, especially outdoors on a phone.

There is no <h1>, so neither visitors nor Google get a clear main headline.

Your meta description is 180 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

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

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

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

The homepage links to 276 pages on holts.com and 4 external pages.

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.

/contacts, /shipping-info and /brand/index/all use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

Your homepage links to 4 pages by a URL that isn't their canonical one, for example /cigars/new-arrivals.html, whose canonical is /cigars/new-arrivals.html?limit=all&p=0. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

/cigars/all-cigar-brands.html, /cigars/staff-picks.html, /cigars/bundle-heaven.html and /cigars/all-cigar-brands/brand/ashton took over 3 s to send their HTML from our server.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 196 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

No viewport meta tag, so phones render the desktop layout zoomed out.

11 of 37 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

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

1 error was logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found)”.

No Strict-Transport-Security header, so browsers may still try plain http first on a return visit.

The server only offers HTTP/1.1, so browsers open several connections and load files more slowly. Most hosts and CDNs turn on HTTP/2 with a setting.

X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff is missing, so browsers may guess file types.

1 link go through two or more redirects, for example https://instagram.com/holtscigar.

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.

holts.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.

holts.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.

Social proof on the homepage: 3 testimonial or review blocks. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

The homepage has only about 70 words of visible text; thin pages give Google and first-time buyers little to go on.

Your phone number appears as text but isn't a tel: link, so phone visitors can't tap to call.

DMARC is set to p=none, so mail pretending to be holts.com is still delivered. Reports are on, so moving to quarantine is the next step.

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 and Xandr (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 21 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 23 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.