mirror.co.uk website review

About 2.7 MB 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.

A phone's processor spends 22.0 s on main-thread work while loading, 12.3 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

Your mobile performance score is 5. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

The page goes through 1 redirect before it starts loading, costing about 754 ms. Link and advertise the final URL directly.

20 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 685 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

awswaf.com costs a phone 91 ms of main-thread work and 305 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.

1 third-party service load with your homepage (awswaf.com), adding 305 KiB and 91 ms of main-thread time.

22 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

2 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

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 11.0 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 23.3 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 28.3 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 4.7 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

The page becomes fully interactive after 84.6 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

The layout shifts by 0.446 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

Real visitors wait 365 ms for the page to respond to a tap (75th percentile). Good is under 200 ms.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.2 s to 2.1 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 9.4 MB in 1,242 requests on a phone: scripts 6.3 MB (144), other files 1.2 MB (582) and images 943 KiB (337). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

0_MAIN-HEALEY1.jpg is on the first screen but marked loading="lazy", so the browser waits before fetching it and the page looks finished later. Load it eagerly (and give it fetchpriority="high" if it is the main image).

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 2.68 g of CO₂e: 321.2 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Links must have discernible text: 3 elements on the page fail this check, rated serious by axe-core.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 3 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

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

Elements with visible text labels do not have matching accessible names. (8 elements).

The homepage links to 250 pages on mirror.co.uk and 56 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 https://www.mirror.co.uk/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.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/all-about/crime has no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news, https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am, https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football, https://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news and https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics and 7 others have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle and https://www.mirror.co.uk/opinion 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.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/opinion and https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news took over 3 s to send their HTML from our server.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 140 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 image failed to load on a phone, for example https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=331470507705028&ev=PageView&noscript=1.

86 of 110 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

36 third-party cookies are set on load; browsers are restricting these, so whatever relies on them breaks.

The page uses 1 deprecated browser API that will stop working in future browsers (“Unload event listeners are deprecated and will be removed.”).

4 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: net::ERR_TUNNEL_CONNECTION_FAILED”.

Large scripts ship without source maps.

Chrome logged issues while loading the page (“Mixed content”).

Social proof on the homepage: 8 trust badges. 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.

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 1,110 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Amazon Ads, Amplitude, Comscore, Criteo and Google Ads and 8 mores (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 26 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 125 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.