rarewaves.com website review

11 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 1.4 s.

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

The page has 6,211 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

A phone's processor spends 5.3 s on main-thread work while loading, 2.4 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Klevu Search and PayPal and others), adding 1.8 MB and 2.0 s of main-thread time.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 862 ms of main-thread work and 955 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 794 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

Klevu Search costs a phone 415 ms of main-thread work and 161 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.

15 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 399 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

22 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (364 KiB).

PayPal costs a phone 336 ms of main-thread work and 261 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.

72 KiB JavaScript is shipped twice across bundles. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

2 images could be 134 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

About 27 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

Polyfills for old browsers add 26 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

17 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

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 page becomes fully interactive after 19.2 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Your largest element takes 7.3 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 1.0 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Real visitors wait 204 ms for the page to respond to a tap (75th percentile). Good is under 200 ms.

Visually, the page fills in at 5.5 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The first text or image appears after 2.6 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your homepage downloads 3.9 MB in 281 requests on a phone: scripts 2.0 MB (120), images 897 KiB (12) and other files 695 KiB (105). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

mm-sale-lg.jpg 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).

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 1.10 g of CO₂e: 131.6 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Form elements must have labels: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated critical by axe-core.

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

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.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

1 tap target is too small or too close together to hit reliably with a finger.

Headings skip levels (h2 → h4), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

Your title is 74 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “Low prices across Vinyl, CD, DVD, Blu-ray, Books and More! – Rarewaves.com”.

Your meta description is 305 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

Your <h1> is empty.

The homepage links to 579 pages on rarewaves.com and 7 external pages.

There is no https://www.rarewaves.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.

Your homepage links to https://www.rarewaves.com/collections/collectors-multibuy and https://www.rarewaves.com/collections/jigsaw-puzzles, which answer with an error. Visitors hit a dead end and search engines drop them.

https://www.rarewaves.com/collections/bestsellers, https://www.rarewaves.com/collections/best-of-the-year and https://www.rarewaves.com/collections/christmas-books have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

https://www.rarewaves.com/collections/2-for-30-offer, https://www.rarewaves.com/collections/the-criterion-collection, https://www.rarewaves.com/collections/bestsellers, https://www.rarewaves.com/collections/best-of-the-year and https://www.rarewaves.com/collections/christmas-books have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

https://www.rarewaves.com/collections/christmas-books took over 3 s to send its HTML from our server.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 200 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

10 of 40 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

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

Social proof on the homepage: a star rating. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

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 198 words of visible text; thin pages give Google and first-time buyers little to go on.

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 Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Klaviyo and Meta Pixel (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 15 cookies, 1 of them by other companies (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 36 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.