meredithdoench.com website review

3 images could be 908 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 4.2 s faster on a phone.

About 345 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.0 s faster on a phone.

7 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 1.2 s.

About 134 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 910 ms faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 54. Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

4 third-party services load with your homepage (Squarespace, sqspcdn.com and Adobe TypeKit and others), adding 2.1 MB and 499 ms of main-thread time.

Squarespace costs a phone 478 ms of main-thread work and 926 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.

squarespace-cdn.com costs a phone 0 ms of main-thread work and 1,015 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 94 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

2 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 229 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

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.

Your largest element takes 14.0 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Cover image Never Say Die. Woman's face reflected in water …”.

The first text or image appears after 5.7 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 14.0 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 7.5 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 221 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Chrome's UX Report (opens in a new tab) has too little real-visitor traffic for this site, so the figures here are lab measurements from Google's test phone on a throttled 4G connection.

Your homepage downloads 2.3 MB in 61 requests on a phone: images 1,015 KiB (4), scripts 862 KiB (39) and stylesheets 163 KiB (9). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

1 image further down the page (35 KiB) download before anyone scrolls to it. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.64 g of CO₂e: 76.7 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

No meta description, so Google writes its own snippet from whatever text it finds.

Your title is only 15 characters: “Meredith Doench”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

There are 5 <h1> headlines (“Some women aren’t meant to be mothers…”, “nEVER SAY DIE” and “AVAILABLE NOw”). One clear main headline is easier for people and search engines.

No Open Graph image (also missing: og:description), so links shared on LinkedIn, Slack or Facebook show no preview picture.

The homepage links to 29 pages on meredithdoench.com and 17 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.meredithdoench.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.

https://www.meredithdoench.com/books, https://www.meredithdoench.com/books/rs, https://www.meredithdoench.com/books/wu, https://www.meredithdoench.com/books/lh and https://www.meredithdoench.com/new-dropdown all use the title “Reviews 1 — Meredith Doench”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

https://www.meredithdoench.com/books, https://www.meredithdoench.com/books/rs, https://www.meredithdoench.com/books/wu, https://www.meredithdoench.com/books/lh, https://www.meredithdoench.com/about and https://www.meredithdoench.com/events and 2 others have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

Your homepage links to 1 page by a URL that isn't its canonical one, for example https://www.meredithdoench.com/new-dropdown, whose canonical is https://www.meredithdoench.com/books. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

https://www.meredithdoench.com/contact has no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

We fetched 8 pages linked from your homepage and read each the way a search engine does.

2 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Access to XMLHttpRequest at 'https://static1.squarespace.com/static/versioned-site-css/5fde8836f9196c4f5f183c9c/60/5c5a…”.

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.

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.

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

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 776 words of visible text.

Opening the homepage sets 3 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 6 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.