refinery29.com website review

DoubleVerify costs a phone 1.0 s of main-thread work and 431 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 47. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

A phone's processor spends 9.6 s on main-thread work while loading, 5.7 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

12 images could be 4.7 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (DoubleVerify, Google/Doubleclick Ads and pub.network and others), adding 2.4 MB and 2.8 s of main-thread time.

About 1.1 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

Google/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 977 ms of main-thread work and 815 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.

63 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (838 KiB).

2 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 700 ms.

pub.network costs a phone 302 ms of main-thread work and 466 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 290 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Polyfills for old browsers add 43 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

Critical files load one after another instead of in parallel (3 chains). Preconnecting to key origins and preloading the hero image shortens the chain.

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 47.4 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 11.8 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 1.6 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Your largest element takes 4.4 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the element shown below.

Real visitors wait 322 ms for the page to respond to a tap (75th percentile). Good is under 200 ms.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.1 s to 2.6 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

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

8 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' tap response (inp) went from 175 ms to 203 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 8.9 MB in 1,048 requests on a phone: images 5.6 MB (366), scripts 2.5 MB (82) and other files 489 KiB (539). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

2 images weigh 1.2 MB together. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

3 images further down the page (764 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 2.53 g of CO₂e: 303.5 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

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

Links must have discernible text: 3 elements on the page fail this check, rated serious by axe-core.

Banner landmark should not be contained in another landmark: 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.

Headings should not be empty: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated minor by axe-core.

Your title is only 10 characters: “Refinery29”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

Your meta description is 439 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

No favicon is declared in the HTML, so browser tabs and Google's mobile results may show a generic icon.

The homepage links to 97 pages on refinery29.com and 24 external pages.

Your robots.txt shuts out ChatGPT search (OAI-SearchBot), ChatGPT (ChatGPT-User), Claude search (Claude-SearchBot), Claude (Claude-User), Perplexity (PerplexityBot) and Perplexity (Perplexity-User). 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 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://www.refinery29.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, Google-Extended, 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.refinery29.com/en-us and https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/video-hub all use the title “Refinery29”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/video-hub has no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/latine-somos, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/festival-season, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/beauty-studio, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/video-hub, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/aapi-heritage-month and https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/my-period have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/video-hub 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 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 82 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

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

3 of 11 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 “LoadJS”.

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

Large scripts ship without source maps.

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

No analytics or tag manager detected in the HTML, so you can't measure whether any of these fixes work.

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 917 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixel and Pinterest Tag and 4 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 17 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 56 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.