houzz.com website review

28 images could be 727 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 3.0 s faster on a phone.

3 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 2.3 s.

hzcdn.com costs a phone 1.0 s of main-thread work and 3.5 MB of downloads while your page loads. That alone is enough to make taps feel slow. Loading it after the page is usable, or only on the pages that need it, takes that off the critical path.

Your mobile performance score is 49 (desktop: 62). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

6 third-party services load with your homepage (hzcdn.com, Google/Doubleclick Ads and Other Google APIs/SDKs and others), adding 9.0 MB and 1.2 s of main-thread time.

About 1.2 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page.

Vimeo costs a phone 0 ms of main-thread work and 5.0 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.

6 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 445 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

About 94 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

A phone's processor spends 2.5 s on main-thread work while loading, 1.3 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

The page has 2,113 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

Google/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 127 ms of main-thread work and 320 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.

5 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (65 KiB).

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

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.

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

4 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

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.

The page becomes fully interactive after 23.2 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Your largest element takes 7.8 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 9.7 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The first text or image appears after 3.5 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors see the first content after 2.1 s (75th percentile). Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 1.7 s for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 450 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 158 ms to 148 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.1 s to 2.0 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 11.1 MB in 205 requests on a phone: media 6.7 MB (1), scripts 2.1 MB (19) and images 1.8 MB (104). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

14 images (3.2 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 further down the page (647 KiB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

2 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example [email protected] at 584 px wide, shown at 175 px. Resized copies would save about 38 KiB.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 3.16 g of CO₂e: 378.8 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

5 buttons have no accessible name, so screen readers announce just “button”.

ARIA attributes must conform to valid values: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated critical by axe-core.

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

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

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

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 112 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate 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.

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

Alternative text of images should not be repeated as text: 5 elements on the page fail this check, rated minor by axe-core.

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

Your title is 80 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “Houzz for Pros and Homeowners | Build and Design Software | Try Free for 30 Days”.

No Open Graph image, so links shared on LinkedIn, Slack or Facebook show no preview picture.

1 link use generic text like “click here” or “learn more”, which tells Google nothing about the page behind it.

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

The homepage links to 230 pages on houzz.com and 46 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 robots.txt lets ChatGPT search (OAI-SearchBot), ChatGPT (ChatGPT-User), Claude (Claude-User) and Perplexity (PerplexityBot) read the homepage but closes other sections to them, so answers about those pages can't cite you.

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.

/professionals, /professionals/architect/probr0-bo~t_11784, /professionals/design-build/probr0-bo~t_11793 and /professionals/general-contractor/probr0-bo~t_11786 all use the title “Client Challenge”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

/professionals, /professionals/architect/probr0-bo~t_11784, /professionals/design-build/probr0-bo~t_11793 and /professionals/general-contractor/probr0-bo~t_11786 have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

/professionals, /professionals/architect/probr0-bo~t_11784, /professionals/design-build/probr0-bo~t_11793 and /professionals/general-contractor/probr0-bo~t_11786 have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

/professionals, /professionals/architect/probr0-bo~t_11784, /professionals/design-build/probr0-bo~t_11793 and /professionals/general-contractor/probr0-bo~t_11786 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 191 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

10 images failed to load on a phone, for example https://www.houzz.com/js/log?p=evtName=page_impression/evtRequestId=f26b3c8b-5990-41db-b147-f985a20deb63/evtMessage=%7B%7D/evtLocale=en-US/evtSiteId=101/evtDomainId=1/evtDM=2/evtV=1791751177_73257031-.

1 third-party cookie is set on load; browsers are restricting these, so whatever relies on them breaks.

2 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: net::ERR_FAILED”.

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

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.

houzz.com is registered until Oct 2026. If it lapses, the site and its email stop working and someone else can buy the name. Renew it, and turn on auto-renew.

houzz.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.

houzz.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.

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

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 591 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 Tag Manager and Meta Pixel (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 13 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 11 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.