practical.engineering website review

31 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 7.7 s.

About 560 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 3.2 s faster on a phone.

16 images could be 871 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.5 s faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 47. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

5 third-party services load with your homepage (Squarespace, sqspcdn.com and sender.net and others), adding 2.3 MB and 520 ms of main-thread time.

Squarespace costs a phone 468 ms of main-thread work and 1,019 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 64 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 450 ms faster on a phone.

4 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (41 KiB).

About 55 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

squarespace-cdn.com costs a phone 0 ms of main-thread work and 1.0 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.

4 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 246 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

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.

Your largest element takes 13.4 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image.

The first text or image appears after 7.0 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 13.5 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 8.3 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Real visitors wait 3.3 s for the largest content to appear (75th percentile). Good is under 2.5 s.

Real visitors see the first content after 2.5 s (75th percentile). Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 995 ms for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 417 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 3.3 s to 3.3 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 2.4 MB in 84 requests on a phone: scripts 1.1 MB (42), images 1.0 MB (21) and fonts 119 KiB (6). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

DBD-Standing-sm.png is on the first screen but marked loading="lazy", so the browser waits before fetching it and the page looks finished later. Load it eagerly (and give it fetchpriority="high" if it is the main image).

5 images further down the page (215 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 0.67 g of CO₂e: 80.7 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

ARIA roles used must conform to valid values: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated critical by axe-core.

1 dropdown has no label.

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

6 images have no alt text, which hurts accessibility and image search.

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.

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

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

Your title is only 21 characters: “Practical Engineering”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

There are 4 <h1> headlines (“”, “Disasters By Design - Coming March 2027” and “Latest Posts”). One clear main headline is easier for people and search engines.

Structured data found (LocalBusiness and WebSite) but with 2 problems, for example “WebSite: image is not an absolute URL ("//images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55ac34e4e4b0170ef54…”.

The homepage links to 37 pages on practical.engineering and 6 external pages.

Your Organization JSON-LD is missing name, url, logo, sameAs (social profiles), 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://practical.engineering/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://practical.engineering/about, https://practical.engineering/blog, https://practical.engineering/books, https://practical.engineering/email-list, https://practical.engineering/blog/2026/11/3/windows-are-absurd and https://practical.engineering/blog/2026/10/20/whatever-happened-to-fire-escapes and 8 others have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

https://practical.engineering/email-list has 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 14 pages linked from your homepage and read each the way a search engine does.

4 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 401 ()”.

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.

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

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 has only about 209 words of visible text; thin pages give Google and first-time buyers little to go on.

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.

Opening the homepage sets 3 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 7 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.