ncdot.gov website review

About 980 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 5.0 s faster on a phone.

37 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (3.3 MB).

5 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 2.0 s.

293 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

Your mobile performance score is 30 (desktop: 45). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

21 images could be 5.0 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 450 ms faster on a phone.

About 116 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 600 ms faster on a phone.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 333 ms of main-thread work and 440 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.

3 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and YouTube), adding 501 KiB and 346 ms of main-thread time.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 200 ms).

5 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 166 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Polyfills for old browsers add 29 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

7 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

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.

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.

For real visitors the layout shifts by 1.03 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

The layout shifts by 1.902 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

Your largest element takes 25.3 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “A passenger is loaded aboard the McDowell Express shuttle.”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 25.9 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 11.6 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The first text or image appears after 4.3 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 3.9 s for the largest content to appear (75th percentile). Good is under 2.5 s.

10 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 102 ms to 104 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 9.2 MB in 102 requests on a phone: images 6.2 MB (38), scripts 2.1 MB (29) and other files 768 KiB (26). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

DriveNC2026ncdotHomepage.png weighs 1.1 MB. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

1 image is downloaded at several times the size a phone draws it, for example DriveNC2026ncdotHomepage.png at 1,507 px wide, shown at 342 px. Resized copies would save about 602 KiB.

5 images (1.6 MB) are 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.

1 image further down the page (1.1 MB) 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 2.61 g of CO₂e: 313.0 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 13 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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.

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

Headings skip levels (h1 → h4), 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.

No structured data (JSON-LD), so Google can't show rich results such as your logo, ratings or FAQs.

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

6 links use generic text like “click here” or “learn more”, which tells Google nothing about the page behind them.

4 links have no real href, so search engines can't follow them.

The homepage links to 20 pages on ncdot.gov and 12 external pages.

A phone browser shows 548 words, but the HTML your server sends has only 110. GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot read that HTML without running JavaScript, so they see an almost empty page. Server-side rendering or pre-rendering fixes it.

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.

https://www.ncdot.gov/Pages/default.aspx, / and https://www.ncdot.gov/pages/default2.aspx all use the title “N.C. Department of Transportation”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

/, https://www.ncdot.gov/pages/default2.aspx, https://www.ncdot.gov/dmv and https://www.ncdot.gov/divisions/turnpike/Pages/default.aspx have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

Your homepage links to 4 pages by a URL that isn't their canonical one, for example /, whose canonical is https://www.ncdot.gov/Pages/default.aspx. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

/, https://www.ncdot.gov/pages/default2.aspx, https://www.ncdot.gov/divisions/aviation/Pages/default.aspx, https://www.ncdot.gov/dmv, https://www.ncdot.gov/divisions/ferry/Pages/default.aspx and https://www.ncdot.gov/divisions/globaltranspark/Pages/default.aspx and 5 others 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 16 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

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

Large scripts ship without source maps.

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.

Your homepage shows a street address but no LocalBusiness JSON-LD, so Google and AI assistants have to guess your address, hours and phone from the page text.

No phone number or email link on the homepage, so ready-to-buy visitors have one fewer way to reach you.

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

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.

The homepage carries about 548 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads 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 6 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 3 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.