postandcourier.com website review

About 2.0 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 9.1 s faster on a phone.

37 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (1.0 MB).

15 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 1.5 s.

Your mobile performance score is 36 (desktop: 62). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

A phone's processor spends 4.9 s on main-thread work while loading, 3.2 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Google/Doubleclick Ads and Google CDN and others), adding 4.1 MB and 1.9 s of main-thread time.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 724 ms of main-thread work and 1.2 MB 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 470 ms faster on a phone.

Google/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 365 ms of main-thread work and 741 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.

1 image could be 20 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.

Google CDN costs a phone 247 ms of main-thread work and 734 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.

The page has 2,171 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

Taboola costs a phone 131 ms of main-thread work and 365 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.

townnews.com costs a phone 102 ms of main-thread work and 422 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 63 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 250 ms faster on a phone.

19 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 231 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

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

Desktop scores 62 but mobile only 36. A gap that wide usually means heavy scripts and images that hit phones hardest.

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 JavaScript.

The first text or image appears after 12.7 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 25.7 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Major SC cities like Charleston and Columbia have homeless …”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 35.4 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 12.7 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 790 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

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

Your homepage downloads 5.5 MB in 200 requests on a phone: scripts 4.4 MB (87), other files 459 KiB (63) and fonts 274 KiB (7). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

1 image further down the page (20 KiB) 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 1.56 g of CO₂e: 186.8 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

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

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 49 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.

Page should contain a level-one heading: 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.

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

Your title is 136 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “South Carolina Breaking News & Charleston Updates | Post and Courier | Post and Courier |…”.

Structured data found (Organization) but with 3 problems, for example “Organization: missing name”.

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

The homepage links to 294 pages on postandcourier.com and 31 external pages.

Your robots.txt shuts out ChatGPT search (OAI-SearchBot), ChatGPT (ChatGPT-User) and Perplexity (PerplexityBot). These fetch pages to answer people's questions and cite the source, so your site can't be quoted or linked in those answers.

Your Organization JSON-LD is missing name, logo, description and contact details. These are the facts AI assistants use to describe a business and to tell it apart from others with a similar name.

There is no https://www.postandcourier.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, 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.postandcourier.com/manage-subscription, https://www.postandcourier.com/subscribe and https://www.postandcourier.com/charlestonschoice have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

Your homepage links to 1 page by a URL that isn't its canonical one, for example https://www.postandcourier.com/e-paper, whose canonical is https://www.postandcourier.com/epaper. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

https://www.postandcourier.com/manage-subscription, https://www.postandcourier.com/subscribe, https://www.postandcourier.com/news, https://www.postandcourier.com/business, https://www.postandcourier.com/hurricanewire and https://www.postandcourier.com/food and 7 others have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 157 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

15 of 68 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

1 third-party cookie is set on load; browsers are restricting these, so whatever relies on them breaks.

6 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 403 ()”.

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

Requests the notification permission on page load.

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

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.

Social proof on the homepage: 42 testimonial or review blocks. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

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 1,610 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Criteo, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and HubSpot and 3 mores (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (HubSpot cookie banner) is installed; check it blocks these until visitors agree where the law requires it.

Opening the homepage sets 21 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 58 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.