hostelworld.com website review

132 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (1.9 MB).

Your mobile performance score is 43 (desktop: 56). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

The page has 5,045 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

About 850 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 750 ms faster on a phone.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Facebook and TikTok and others), adding 1.7 MB and 939 ms of main-thread time.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 544 ms of main-thread work and 994 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, 2.1 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

3 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 300 ms.

17 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 209 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

About 17 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.

4 images could be 95 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

39 KiB JavaScript is shipped twice across bundles.

Polyfills for old browsers add 33 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.

Your largest element takes 11.5 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “Meet your people. Book your bed. Join the chat. Make plans.”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 22.0 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

The first text or image appears after 5.3 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 6.2 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 659 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Real visitors wait 331 ms for the page to respond to a tap (75th percentile). Good is under 200 ms.

Real visitors wait 924 ms 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 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 265 ms to 309 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.8 s to 2.9 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 4.3 MB in 268 requests on a phone: scripts 2.4 MB (107), images 1.4 MB (50) and other files 379 KiB (86). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

3 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example large.jpg at 1,008 px wide, shown at 112 px. Resized copies would save about 504 KiB.

3 images (516 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.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 1.21 g of CO₂e: 145.0 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Scrollable region must have keyboard access: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated serious by axe-core.

Elements with visible text labels do not have matching accessible names. (10 elements).

Your meta description is 185 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

The homepage links to 62 pages on hostelworld.com and 25 external pages.

/events/e/6ae01c2b533fe2ecbcab17cc/festival-de-otono, /hostels/europe/england/london and /hostels/europe/germany/berlin took over 3 s to send their HTML from our server.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 58 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

2 images failed to load on a phone, for example https://bat.bing.com/action/0?ti=187182452&tm=gtm002&Ver=2&mid=0c076fac-4e14-4c21-975b-5360f8789daa&bo=2&sid=a2bf48c0d24a11f1af6b5b53f87b16d6&vid=a2bf8450d24a11f1b3363b5af267b72c&vids=1&msclkid=N&pi=9.

HSTS is set, but max-age is 180 days; one year is the recommended minimum.

2 links go through two or more redirects, for example https://hostelworld.onelink.me/IdiK/mhcpyui2.

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.

hostelworld.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 phone number or email link on the homepage, so ready-to-buy visitors have one fewer way to reach you.

There is no form on the homepage, so every lead has to click through to another page first.

The homepage carries about 754 words of visible text.

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, Hotjar and Meta Pixel and 3 mores (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (TrustArc) is installed; check it blocks these until visitors agree where the law requires it.

Opening the homepage sets 22 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 28 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.