mbta.com website review

About 1.1 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 5.7 s faster on a phone.

2 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 4.5 s.

3 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (230 KiB).

Your mobile performance score is 43 (desktop: 54). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Facebook and TikTok and others), adding 1.2 MB and 907 ms of main-thread time.

About 132 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 750 ms faster on a phone.

9 images could be 403 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 450 ms faster on a phone.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 489 ms of main-thread work and 652 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.

Polyfills for old browsers add 32 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

A phone's processor spends 2.1 s on main-thread work while loading, 968 ms of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

The page has 1,634 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

11 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 182 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Critical files load one after another instead of in parallel (3 chains). Preconnecting to key origins and preloading the hero image shortens the chain.

The first text or image appears after 9.2 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 21.5 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “Subway Status”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 21.6 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 9.2 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 522 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

8 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' tap response (inp) went from 156 ms to 148 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 1.1 s to 1.0 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 3.5 MB in 57 requests on a phone: scripts 1.9 MB (18), images 839 KiB (15) and fonts 604 KiB (6). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

8 images (563 KiB) 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.

8 images further down the page (563 KiB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

3 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example Subway-Wordless-for-homepage-revised-2018-12-11.png at 1,920 px wide, shown at 350 px. Resized copies would save about 187 KiB.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.99 g of CO₂e: 118.6 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

<svg> elements with an img or image role must have alternative text: 8 elements on the page fail this check, rated serious by axe-core.

1 text element doesn't have enough contrast against the background to read easily, especially outdoors on a phone.

6 visible links have no text or label, so screen readers cannot say where they go.

5 form fields have no label, so screen readers announce an empty box and autofill guesses.

Elements with visible text labels do not have matching accessible names. (4 elements).

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

There are 2 <h1> headlines (“Main Menu” and “MBTA Homepage”). One clear main headline is easier for people and search engines.

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://www.mbta.com/sitemap.xml, so Google discovers your pages only by following links.

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

The homepage links to 232 pages on mbta.com and 19 external pages.

Your robots.txt shuts out ChatGPT search (OAI-SearchBot) 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 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, 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.

/ and /menu all use the title “MBTA - Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

/menu, /accessibility/the-ride, /parking, /bikes, /guides and /holidays and 2 others use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

/stops took over 3 s to send its HTML from our server.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 135 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

3 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Connecting to 'https://sl-11a463aaedf44600a99367660fd6fa70.ecs.us-east-1.on.aws/events?cee=no' violates the following C…”.

Chrome logged issues while loading the page (“Content security policy”).

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: 1 customer or partner logo. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

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 440 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixel and TikTok Pixel (measured from a US location before any click). No consent tool was detected. Visitors from the EU, UK and several US states must be asked first.

Opening the homepage sets 10 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 17 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.