notthebee.com website review

152 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (1.8 MB).

About 2.1 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 3.5 s faster on a phone.

4 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 5.5 s.

A phone's processor spends 18.7 s on main-thread work while loading, 10.1 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

YouTube costs a phone 1.4 s of main-thread work and 1.9 MB of downloads while your page loads. That alone is enough to make taps feel slow. Loading it after the page is usable, or only on the pages that need it, takes that off the critical path.

Rubicon Project costs a phone 1.1 s of main-thread work and 120 KiB of downloads while your page loads. That alone is enough to make taps feel slow. Loading it after the page is usable, or only on the pages that need it, takes that off the critical path.

Your mobile performance score is 25 (desktop: 46). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (YouTube, Rubicon Project and script.ac and others), adding 3.9 MB and 5.2 s of main-thread time.

25 images could be 922 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 800 ms faster on a phone.

script.ac costs a phone 893 ms of main-thread work and 198 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.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 831 ms of main-thread work and 736 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 587 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Polyfills for old browsers add 28 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

Pubmatic costs a phone 317 ms of main-thread work and 76 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.

About 106 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 50 ms).

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.

The first text or image appears after 14.2 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 22.2 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Image for article: Poll: 42% of American college students p…”.

Visually, the page fills in at 19.1 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 71.4 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 3.8 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

For real visitors the layout shifts by 0.11 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

1 image 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 95 ms to 99 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 8.0 MB in 1,311 requests on a phone: scripts 4.7 MB (115), images 1.1 MB (424) and fonts 885 KiB (5). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

12 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example 6ac306ed244e76ac306ed244e8.jpg at 1,500 px wide, shown at 96 px. Resized copies would save about 569 KiB.

13 images (832 KiB) 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.

11 images further down the page (688 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 2.26 g of CO₂e: 271.5 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

2 tap targets are too small or too close together to hit reliably with a finger.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 4 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

There is no robots.txt at notthebee.com/robots.txt, the first file search crawlers ask for.

No twitter:card tag. X falls back to Open Graph, which is set, so this is minor.

The homepage links to 69 pages on notthebee.com and 11 external pages.

There is no https://notthebee.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://notthebee.com/category/polls, https://notthebee.com/category/illegal-voting, https://notthebee.com/category/makeorwellfictionagain and https://notthebee.com/category/scam are marked noindex but linked from your homepage. If they are meant to be found, remove the noindex.

/, https://notthebee.com/podcast and https://notthebee.com/social all use the title “Not the Bee | What a time to be alive”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

https://notthebee.com/podcast, https://notthebee.com/social, https://notthebee.com/podcasts, https://notthebee.com/discover, https://notthebee.com/category/polls and https://notthebee.com/articles/docholliday and 5 others use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

https://notthebee.com/social, https://notthebee.com/podcasts, https://notthebee.com/discover, https://notthebee.com/articles/docholliday, https://notthebee.com/articles/DavyCrockettNTB and https://notthebee.com/articles/JesseJames have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

https://notthebee.com/podcast, https://notthebee.com/social, https://notthebee.com/podcasts, https://notthebee.com/articles/docholliday, https://notthebee.com/articles/DavyCrockettNTB and https://notthebee.com/articles/JesseJames 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 45 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

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

14 of 32 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

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

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

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

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

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 480 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Criteo, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and The Trade Desk and 2 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 25 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 108 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.