mikestough.com website review

About 641 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 3.3 s faster on a phone.

10 images could be 1.7 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 1.1 s faster on a phone.

5 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 1.0 s.

Your mobile performance score is 65. Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

About 139 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 850 ms faster on a phone.

Polyfills for old browsers add 145 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 800 ms faster on a phone.

3 third-party services load with your homepage (Squarespace, sqspcdn.com and squarespace-cdn.com), adding 3.6 MB and 373 ms of main-thread time.

Squarespace costs a phone 321 ms of main-thread work and 910 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 2.3 MB 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.

sqspcdn.com costs a phone 52 ms of main-thread work and 398 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.

2 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 151 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.

Your largest element takes 11.5 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “A creative professional who blends strategy, design, and st…”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 11.6 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 6.6 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

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

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

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 3.6 MB in 62 requests on a phone: images 2.3 MB (13), scripts 1.1 MB (38) and stylesheets 165 KiB (7). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

9 images further down the page (1,000 KiB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 1.03 g of CO₂e: 123.9 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.

Links must have discernible text: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated serious by axe-core.

Alternative text of images should not be repeated as text: 12 elements on the page fail this check, rated minor by axe-core.

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

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

Your title is only 11 characters: “Mike Stough”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

Structured data found (LocalBusiness and WebSite) but with 2 problems, for example “WebSite: image is not an absolute URL ("//images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60a167840100905afd9…”.

Open Graph is missing og:description, so shared links fall back to guesses.

The homepage links to 29 pages on mikestough.com and 0 external pages.

Your Organization JSON-LD is missing name, url, logo, 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://www.mikestough.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.mikestough.com/creative-ops, https://www.mikestough.com/ai-work, https://www.mikestough.com/about, https://www.mikestough.com/work1/jpmcc, https://www.mikestough.com/work1/spruce and https://www.mikestough.com/work1/companyofchoice and 9 others have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

https://www.mikestough.com/creative-ops, https://www.mikestough.com/ai-work, https://www.mikestough.com/about, https://www.mikestough.com/work1/jpmcc, https://www.mikestough.com/work1/spruce and https://www.mikestough.com/work1/companyofchoice and 9 others have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

https://www.mikestough.com/work1/companyofchoice and https://www.mikestough.com/work1/photo 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 17 found) 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/60a167840100905afd999ed1/114/5c5…”.

On a phone, there is no call to action on the first screen: visitors have to scroll to find out what to do next.

We found no call-to-action buttons or links (such as “Book a demo” or “Get a quote”) anywhere on the homepage.

No testimonials, customer logos, ratings or customer counts on the homepage: nothing tells a new visitor that others already trust you.

A local customer looking to call finds no phone number on the homepage. Add one, ideally as a tap-to-call link.

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.

The homepage has only about 63 words of visible text; thin pages give Google and first-time buyers little to go on.

The homepage shows no opening hours. If customers visit or call, show when.

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

There is no link to Google or Apple Maps. A directions link is one tap for a phone visitor.

No guarantee or risk reducer (money-back, free trial, no credit card) is mentioned, which is often what tips a hesitant visitor.

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 5 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.