loc.gov website review

70 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (5.3 MB).

About 3.3 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 21.8 s faster on a phone.

4 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 16.1 s.

1.7 MB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

23 images could be 3.0 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 7.5 s faster on a phone.

About 1.2 MB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 6.2 s faster on a phone.

280 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

Your mobile performance score is 54 (desktop: 56). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

Polyfills for old browsers add 84 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

3 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 166 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

1 third-party service load with your homepage (Adobe Tag Manager), adding 102 KiB and 88 ms of main-thread time.

The HTML itself could arrive sooner: redirects, a slow server response or missing compression delay everything after it.

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

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 first text or image appears after 16.1 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 68.7 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Portrait of Martha C. Nussbaum.”.

Visually, the page fills in at 19.4 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 69.6 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

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

12 images have no width and height attributes, so the layout jumps as each one loads.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.8 s to 1.7 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 14.5 MB in 87 requests on a phone: images 7.2 MB (62), scripts 4.6 MB (7) and stylesheets 1.3 MB (2). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

3 images weigh 3.3 MB together. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

25 images (6.0 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.

12 images further down the page (561 KiB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

11 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example A2501200x560.jpeg at 1,200 px wide, shown at 390 px. Resized copies would save about 234 KiB.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 4.11 g of CO₂e: 493.5 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

ARIA role should be appropriate for the element: 4 elements on the page fail this check, rated minor by axe-core.

Elements marked as presentational should be consistently ignored: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated minor by axe-core.

Your title is only 26 characters: “Home | Library of Congress”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

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 favicon is declared in the HTML, so browser tabs and Google's mobile results may show a generic icon.

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

The homepage links to 75 pages on loc.gov and 27 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.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 57 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

12 of 49 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

2 third-party cookies are 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”).

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: 2 customer or partner logos. 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 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 678 words of visible text.

Opening the homepage sets 11 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.