igem.org website review

20 images could be 22.1 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 42.8 s faster on a phone.

28 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (563 KiB).

About 201 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 1.1 s faster on a phone.

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

A phone's processor spends 4.3 s on main-thread work while loading, 836 ms of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

8 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 2.3 s. During a long task the page ignores taps.

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

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.

1 third-party service load with your homepage (Unpkg), adding 2 KiB and 2 ms of main-thread time.

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 0.93 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

Your largest element takes 73.3 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “https://static.igem.org/websites/igem/2025/home/banners/ige…”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 74.4 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 1.7 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Real visitors wait 3.1 s for the largest content to appear (75th percentile). Good is under 2.5 s.

Real visitors wait 223 ms for the page to respond to a tap (75th percentile). Good is under 200 ms.

Visually, the page fills in at 5.4 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The first text or image appears after 1.9 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

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 207 ms to 203 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 27.2 MB in 99 requests on a phone: images 24.3 MB (52), other files 1.4 MB (15) and fonts 907 KiB (2). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

your-ticket-to-the-future-19s.webp weighs 6.8 MB. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

7 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example hero-community.webp at 2,000 px wide, shown at 293 px. Resized copies would save about 1.4 MB.

1 image (34 KiB) is 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 7.72 g of CO₂e: 926.3 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

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

Scrollable region must have keyboard access: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated serious by axe-core.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 51 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Document should not have more than one banner landmark: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

Landmarks should have a unique role or role/label/title (i.e. accessible name) combination: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

Your page has no <title>, so Google has to invent the blue link in search results.

No meta description, so Google writes its own snippet from whatever text it finds.

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

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

No canonical URL, so duplicate versions of the homepage (with or without www, with tracking parameters) can split ranking signals.

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

No XML sitemap at https://igem.org/sitemap.xml, so Google discovers your pages only by following links.

The homepage links to only 0 pages on your own site, so visitors and crawlers find few routes into the rest of it.

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

A phone browser shows 1,587 words, but the HTML your server sends has only 0. GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot read that HTML without running JavaScript, so they see an almost empty page. Server-side rendering or pre-rendering fixes it.

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.

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.

robots.txt blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended and CCBot, which collect pages to train models. That's a legitimate choice and doesn't by itself stop the site appearing in AI answers, which the crawlers above handle.

8 of 32 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

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 401 ()”.

Large scripts ship without source maps.

No Content-Security-Policy header, the main browser-side defence against injected scripts.

Neither X-Frame-Options nor a CSP frame-ancestors policy is set, so any site can embed yours in a frame.

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

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.

igem.org 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.

igem.org'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.

We found no call-to-action buttons or links (such as “Book a demo” or “Get a quote”) anywhere on the homepage.

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.

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

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 1,587 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.

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 1 host run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.