rollingstone.com website review

A phone's processor spends 11.2 s on main-thread work while loading, 6.8 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

13 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 1.0 s.

Your mobile performance score is 15 (desktop: 49). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Cloudflare CDN, Google Tag Manager and Ad Lightning and others), adding 3.2 MB and 2.6 s of main-thread time.

184 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (1.8 MB).

About 1.4 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page.

Cloudflare CDN costs a phone 696 ms of main-thread work and 695 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.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 426 ms of main-thread work and 670 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.

Ad Lightning costs a phone 386 ms of main-thread work and 147 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.

Google/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 332 ms of main-thread work and 502 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.

Optanon costs a phone 304 ms of main-thread work and 334 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 2,017 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

20 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 213 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Polyfills for old browsers add 142 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

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

2 images could be 47 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

About 47 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

Desktop scores 49 but mobile only 15. A gap that wide usually means heavy scripts and images that hit phones hardest.

9 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.

For real visitors the layout shifts by 0.35 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

Visually, the page fills in at 18.9 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 71.4 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Your largest element takes 7.9 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “albums of 1976”.

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

The layout shifts by 0.424 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

The first text or image appears after 2.9 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.0 s to 1.9 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 8.1 MB in 1,138 requests on a phone: scripts 5.4 MB (261), fonts 1.0 MB (24) and other files 776 KiB (448). 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 2.29 g of CO₂e: 275.0 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

3 elements hidden from screen readers can still receive keyboard focus.

2 frames have no title, so screen-reader users cannot tell what they contain.

Some lists contain elements other than list items, which screen readers announce wrongly.

Some list items are not inside a list.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 10 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

2 form fields have no label, so screen readers announce an empty box and autofill guesses.

Headings skip levels (h1 → h3), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

3 links use generic text like “click here” or “learn more”, which tells Google nothing about the page behind them.

The homepage links to 158 pages on rollingstone.com and 73 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 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 /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.

/manage-print-account has no <title>, so Google invents the link text in results.

/tips, /manage-print-account, /music, /politics, /culture and /author/jack-crosbie and 1 other have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

/manage-print-account has no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

/manage-print-account 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 98 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

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

8 of 23 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

The page uses 2 deprecated browser APIs that will stop working in future browsers (“Unload event listeners are deprecated and will be removed.”).

4 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Uncaught (in promise) NotSupportedError: Failed to execute 'browsingTopics' on 'Document': document.browsingTopics() is…”.

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

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 phone number or email link on the homepage, so ready-to-buy visitors have one fewer way to reach you.

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 987 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Amazon Ads, Comscore, Criteo, Google Ads and Google Analytics and 5 mores (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (OneTrust) is installed; check it blocks these until visitors agree where the law requires it.

Opening the homepage sets 32 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 88 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.