nbcnews.com website review

105 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (1.5 MB).

About 2.4 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 1.6 s faster on a phone.

16 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 1.6 s.

A phone's processor spends 13.3 s on main-thread work while loading, 8.7 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

Your mobile performance score is 11. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

The page has 5,929 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Taboola, Google/Doubleclick Ads and DoubleVerify and others), adding 3.6 MB and 2.3 s of main-thread time.

About 193 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 630 ms faster on a phone.

11 images could be 483 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

Taboola costs a phone 658 ms of main-thread work and 1,016 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.

20 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 490 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Google/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 387 ms of main-thread work and 497 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.

DoubleVerify costs a phone 313 ms of main-thread work and 444 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.

Polar costs a phone 248 ms of main-thread work and 922 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.

Adobe Tag Manager costs a phone 166 ms of main-thread work and 330 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 93 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).

48 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

14 KiB JavaScript is shipped twice across bundles.

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.

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.

Your largest element takes 20.6 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Trump”.

Visually, the page fills in at 18.4 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 60.6 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

The first text or image appears after 7.3 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 2.5 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

The layout shifts by 0.313 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

For real visitors the layout shifts by 0.12 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

13 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 129 ms to 145 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 9.7 MB in 543 requests on a phone: scripts 5.9 MB (224), images 2.6 MB (103) and other files 474 KiB (168). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

261005-ken-paxton-ew-408p-4e73e3.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).

4 images further down the page (590 KiB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

1 image is downloaded at several times the size a phone draws it, for example 261011-isaias-vl-1124a-d09a59.jpg at 762 px wide, shown at 85 px. Resized copies would save about 130 KiB.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 2.74 g of CO₂e: 329.2 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

1 button has no accessible name, so screen readers announce just “button”.

7 elements hidden from screen readers can still receive keyboard focus.

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

Scrollable region must have keyboard access: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated serious by axe-core.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 145 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.

Landmarks should have a unique role or role/label/title (i.e. accessible name) combination: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Page should contain a level-one heading: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

Headings should not be empty: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated minor by axe-core.

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

There is no <h1>, so neither visitors nor Google get a clear main headline.

Your title is 90 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “NBC News - Breaking Headlines and Video Reports on World, U.S. and Local Angles | NBC News”.

Structured data found (CollectionPage, Dataset and WebSite) but with 1 problem, for example “WebSite: missing name”.

1 link use generic text like “click here” or “learn more”, which tells Google nothing about the page behind it.

The homepage links to 250 pages on nbcnews.com and 51 external pages.

Your robots.txt shuts out ChatGPT search (OAI-SearchBot), ChatGPT (ChatGPT-User), Claude search (Claude-SearchBot), Claude (Claude-User), Perplexity (PerplexityBot) and Perplexity (Perplexity-User). 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.nbcnews.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.

robots.txt blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, 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.nbcnews.com/new-york, https://www.nbcnews.com/los-angeles, https://www.nbcnews.com/chicago, https://www.nbcnews.com/dallas-fort-worth, https://www.nbcnews.com/philadelphia and https://www.nbcnews.com/washington and 5 others have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

https://www.nbcnews.com/new-york, https://www.nbcnews.com/los-angeles, https://www.nbcnews.com/chicago, https://www.nbcnews.com/dallas-fort-worth, https://www.nbcnews.com/philadelphia and https://www.nbcnews.com/washington and 5 others have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

https://www.nbcnews.com/miami took over 3 s to send its HTML from our server.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 124 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

65 of 95 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

8 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.”).

3 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 ()”.

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

Large scripts ship without source maps.

Social proof on the homepage: 13 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 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 2,064 words of visible text.

The page uses urgency cues (a countdown or limited-time wording).

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Amazon Ads, Comscore, Criteo, Google Ads and Google Tag Manager and 2 mores (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (OneTrust) is installed; check it blocks these until visitors agree where the law requires it.

Opening the homepage sets 45 cookies, 1 of them by other companies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 71 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.