northwesternmutual.com website review

About 933 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 6.5 s faster on a phone.

35 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (433 KiB).

Your mobile performance score is 48. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Dynatrace, Google CDN and Optanon and others), adding 1.3 MB and 905 ms of main-thread time.

Google CDN costs a phone 332 ms of main-thread work and 742 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.

Dynatrace costs a phone 346 ms of main-thread work and 167 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 37 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

A phone's processor spends 3.4 s on main-thread work while loading, 2.0 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

3 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 300 ms.

11 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 244 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

About 71 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. 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 150 ms).

2 images could be 30 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

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.

For real visitors the layout shifts by 0.28 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

The first text or image appears after 8.0 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 16.8 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the element shown below.

The page becomes fully interactive after 16.8 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 8.5 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 361 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-11-07, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.5 s to 2.4 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 3.1 MB in 75 requests on a phone: scripts 1.8 MB (31), fonts 574 KiB (12) and other files 412 KiB (13). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.89 g of CO₂e: 107.1 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: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

1 form field has no label, so screen readers announce an empty box and autofill guesses.

Headings skip levels (h4 → h6), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

Elements with visible text labels do not have matching accessible names. (7 elements).

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

Your meta description is 174 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

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

The homepage links to 85 pages on northwesternmutual.com and 11 external pages.

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.northwesternmutual.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.northwesternmutual.com/retirement-planning/retirement-calculator has no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 45 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

2 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 ()”.

Large scripts ship without source maps.

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 carries about 1,335 words of visible text.

Opening the homepage sets 8 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 11 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.