oldham.gov.uk website review

14 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 4.0 s.

34 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (438 KiB).

Your mobile performance score is 75. Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

2 images could be 452 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

7 third-party services load with your homepage (Cookiebot, Browsealoud and Google Tag Manager and others), adding 1.0 MB and 347 ms of main-thread time.

About 305 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page.

Browsealoud costs a phone 84 ms of main-thread work and 360 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 84 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 140 ms faster on a phone.

12 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 100 ms).

3 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 68 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

6 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.

The page becomes fully interactive after 10.5 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 6.5 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The first text or image appears after 3.0 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

The layout shifts by 0.185 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

Your largest element takes 3.0 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “To help us continually improve our website we use non-perso…”. Most of its time is element render delay (2.6 s).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 75 ms to 79 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 0.9 s to 0.9 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.49 g of CO₂e: 58.4 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

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

Headings should not be empty: 3 elements on the page fail this check, rated minor by axe-core.

Your title is only 13 characters: “Main Homepage”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

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

Your meta description is only 35 characters: “Homepage for Oldham Council website”. 70 to 160 characters is enough to sell the click.

No canonical URL, so duplicate versions of the homepage (with or without www, with tracking parameters) can split ranking signals.

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

No twitter:card tag. X falls back to Open Graph, which is incomplete here.

The homepage links to 135 pages on oldham.gov.uk and 19 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.oldham.gov.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.

https://www.oldham.gov.uk/a_to_z/A, https://www.oldham.gov.uk/a_to_z/B, https://www.oldham.gov.uk/a_to_z/C, https://www.oldham.gov.uk/a_to_z/D, https://www.oldham.gov.uk/a_to_z/E and https://www.oldham.gov.uk/a_to_z/F and 9 others use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

https://www.oldham.gov.uk/a_to_z/J and https://www.oldham.gov.uk/a_to_z/K 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 107 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

3 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Access to XMLHttpRequest at 'https://www.google.com/cse/static/element/dc6f600a0d4404e5/default_v6+en.css' from origin …”.

On a phone, there is no call to action on the first screen: visitors have to scroll to find out what to do next.

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.

A local customer looking to call finds no phone number on the homepage. Add one, ideally as a tap-to-call link.

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

The homepage has only about 240 words of visible text; thin pages give Google and first-time buyers little to go on.

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.

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

Opening the homepage sets 2 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.