lichess.org website review

Your mobile performance score is 76 (desktop: 98). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

A phone's processor spends 2.0 s on main-thread work while loading, 413 ms of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

lichess1.org costs a phone 73 ms of main-thread work and 681 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.

3 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 200 ms.

6 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 162 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

1 third-party service load with your homepage (lichess1.org), adding 681 KiB and 73 ms of main-thread time.

2 images could be 36 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

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 4.5 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “IM Sladgie Legendary Clsssical Simul! lichess.org !donate !…”.

The first text or image appears after 3.2 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 4.6 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 3.9 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 142 ms to 144 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 1.3 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 0.19 g of CO₂e: 22.9 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

25 links inside paragraphs rely on colour alone to stand out.

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

1 tap target is too small or too close together to hit reliably with a finger.

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

The viewport tag blocks pinch-zoom, which low-vision visitors rely on.

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

<td> elements in a large <table> do not have table headers. (1 element).

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.

Your meta description is 162 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

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

1 link has no real href, so search engines can't follow it.

No twitter:card tag. X falls back to Open Graph, which is set, so this is minor.

The homepage links to 104 pages on lichess.org and 14 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 /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.

/page/network-administrators, /swiss, /training/themes, /storm, /racer and /study and 1 other use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

/training, /streak, /storm, /learn, /training/coordinate and /study have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

/training, /streak, /storm, /racer, /learn and /training/coordinate 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 66 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

31 of 113 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: net::ERR_TUNNEL_CONNECTION_FAILED”.

10 links from your homepage to your own site are broken, for example https://lichess.org/broadcast (network).

1 link to other sites is dead, for example https://bsky.app/profile/lichess.org (404).

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

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 testimonials, customer logos, ratings or customer counts on the homepage: nothing tells a new visitor that others already trust you.

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

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 572 words of visible text.

We found no DKIM key on the selectors the big email providers use. If you send through one of them, turning on DKIM signing improves delivery.

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.

Opening the homepage sets 1 cookie (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 2 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.