kcrg.com website review

About 2.0 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 4.5 s faster on a phone.

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

58 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (837 KiB).

Taboola costs a phone 1.5 s of main-thread work and 8.5 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 29 (desktop: 49). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

A phone's processor spends 9.5 s on main-thread work while loading, 5.1 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Taboola, Google/Doubleclick Ads and Google Tag Manager and others), adding 10.8 MB and 3.2 s of main-thread time.

18 images could be 358 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 250 ms faster on a phone.

Google/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 441 ms of main-thread work and 473 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.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 384 ms of main-thread work and 425 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.

20 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 375 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Other Google APIs/SDKs costs a phone 227 ms of main-thread work and 445 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.

The page has 2,357 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

Tealium costs a phone 184 ms of main-thread work and 383 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.

About 88 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.

Polyfills for old browsers add 83 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

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.

3 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

2 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

Your largest element takes 19.4 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorses Republican Rep. Ashley Hi…”.

Visually, the page fills in at 15.5 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 46.5 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 1.9 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

The first text or image appears after 4.1 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 111 ms to 106 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 1.8 s to 2.1 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 12.8 MB in 533 requests on a phone: media 6.5 MB (5), scripts 3.8 MB (80) and images 1.3 MB (164). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 3.64 g of CO₂e: 436.8 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

Links must have discernible text: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated serious by axe-core.

Elements must only use permitted ARIA attributes: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated serious by axe-core.

2 images have no alt text, which hurts accessibility and image search.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 47 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

1 frame has no title, so screen-reader users cannot tell what it contains.

Headings skip levels (h2 → h6, h3 → h6 and h2 → h4), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

Elements with visible text labels do not have matching accessible names. (2 elements).

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

Your title is 76 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “KCRG | Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Waterloo, Dubuque | News, Sports and Weather”.

Structured data found (NewsMediaOrganization and WebPage) but with 1 problem, for example “NewsMediaOrganization: logo is not an absolute URL ("//webpubcontent.gray.tv/gray/arc-fusion-assets…”.

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

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

The homepage links to 213 pages on kcrg.com and 16 external pages.

Your robots.txt shuts out ChatGPT (ChatGPT-User) and Perplexity (PerplexityBot). These fetch pages to answer people's questions and cite the source, so your site can't be quoted or linked in those answers.

There is no https://www.kcrg.com/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 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.

https://www.kcrg.com/news and https://www.kcrg.com/video-gallery/news all use the title “News”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

https://www.kcrg.com/community, https://www.kcrg.com/news/education/student-of-the-month, https://www.kcrg.com/everydayfamilies, https://www.kcrg.com/business, https://www.kcrg.com/memorials and https://www.kcrg.com/community/surprise-squad and 2 others have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

https://www.kcrg.com/livestream, https://www.kcrg.com/news, https://www.kcrg.com/weather, https://www.kcrg.com/video-gallery/news and https://www.kcrg.com/content/sports use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

Your homepage links to 2 pages by a URL that isn't their canonical one, for example https://www.kcrg.com/memorials, whose canonical is https://www.kcrg.com/community/obits. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

https://www.kcrg.com/everydayfamilies, https://www.kcrg.com/memorials, https://www.kcrg.com/community/surprise-squad and https://www.kcrg.com/sports/oniowa-live have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

https://www.kcrg.com/business, https://www.kcrg.com/about-us/advertise-with-us, https://www.kcrg.com/community/surprise-squad, https://www.kcrg.com/news/aging-untold, https://www.kcrg.com/page/streaming-studio and https://www.kcrg.com/news and 1 other took over 3 s to send their HTML from our server.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 101 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

21 third-party cookies are set on load; browsers are restricting these, so whatever relies on them breaks.

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

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

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

Large scripts ship without source maps.

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.

The homepage shows no opening hours. If customers visit or call, show when.

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

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

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.

The homepage carries about 1,403 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Amazon Ads, Comscore, Criteo, Google Ads and Google Analytics and 4 mores (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 30 cookies, 1 of them by other companies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 54 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.