michigan.com website review

12 images could be 1.3 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

54 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (477 KiB).

About 500 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 610 ms faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 83. Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

7 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, localiq.com and VWO and others), adding 1,006 KiB and 710 ms of main-thread time.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 467 ms of main-thread work and 537 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.

12 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 500 ms.

7 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 235 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Polyfills for old browsers add 12 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

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

About 14 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

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

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 page becomes fully interactive after 10.9 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 6.3 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Real visitors wait 869 ms for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

The first text or image appears after 2.6 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 249 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Your largest element takes 2.6 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “Reach the audience you’re looking for with help from the ne…”. Most of its time is element render delay (2.3 s).

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 163 ms to 178 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.1 s to 1.9 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 3.0 MB in 76 requests on a phone: images 1.7 MB (23), scripts 890 KiB (25) and other files 271 KiB (10). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

2 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example yelp-partner-badge-platinum-2024-1536x1536-1.webp at 1,536 px wide, shown at 130 px. Resized copies would save about 256 KiB.

5 images further down the page (369 KiB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

1 image (126 KiB) is 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.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.84 g of CO₂e: 100.5 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

1 link inside paragraphs relies on colour alone to stand out.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 33 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

The page has no <main> landmark, so screen-reader users cannot jump straight to the content.

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

Headings skip levels (h1 → h3 and h2 → h4), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

The robots meta tag says “noindex, nofollow”: Google is told not to list this page at all.

Google's crawler is blocked from indexing this page.

No canonical URL, so duplicate versions of the homepage (with or without www, with tracking parameters) can split ranking signals.

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

The homepage links to 30 pages on michigan.com and 24 external pages.

Your Organization JSON-LD is missing sameAs (social profiles), description and contact details. These are the facts AI assistants use to describe a business and to tell it apart from others with a similar name.

There is no https://advertising.usatoday.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.

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

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 29 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 image failed to load on a phone, for example https://advertising.usatoday.com/advertise-with-us/?publication=the_detroit_free_press&utm_source=michigan&utm_medium=redirect&utm_campaign=advertise_with_us.

5 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 ()”.

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 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 295 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager (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 22 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 12 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.