latimes.com website review

7 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (203 KiB).

The page has 5,618 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

Your mobile performance score is 66 (desktop: 70). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

4 third-party services load with your homepage (confiant-integrations.net, californiatimes.com and brightspotcdn.com and others), adding 1.1 MB and 566 ms of main-thread time.

About 336 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

7 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 358 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

10 images could be 342 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

confiant-integrations.net costs a phone 314 ms of main-thread work and 207 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.

brightspotcdn.com costs a phone 60 ms of main-thread work and 742 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 43 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

Polyfills for old browsers add 6 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.

Your largest element takes 7.1 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service, which inc…”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 8.7 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 359 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

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

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 147 ms to 146 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 1.3 s to 1.4 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.50 g of CO₂e: 59.5 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

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

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

Elements with visible text labels do not have matching accessible names. (1 element).

Your title is 69 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “News from California, across the nation and world - Los Angeles Times”.

There are 2 <h1> headlines (“Rachel downgraded from ‘tropical’ storm, but stro…” and “Introducing the California Politics Podcast”). One clear main headline is easier for people and search engines.

Open Graph is missing og:title and og:description, so shared links fall back to guesses.

The homepage links to 639 pages on latimes.com and 133 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.

There is no https://www.latimes.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 and ClaudeBot, 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.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 199 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

12 of 26 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

3 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Access to XMLHttpRequest at 'https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/resource/0000016e-6bb5-d505-abef-fbb7e4420000/styleguid…”.

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.

Social proof on the homepage: 10 trust badges. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

No analytics or tag manager detected in the HTML, so you can't measure whether any of these fixes work.

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 3,108 words of visible text.

Opening the homepage sets 2 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 4 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.