scottmathson.com website review

5 images could be 1.1 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 3.1 s faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 75. Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

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

13 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (150 KiB).

4 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and Cloudflare and others), adding 387 KiB and 198 ms of main-thread time.

Polyfills for old browsers add 10 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

About 136 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page.

2 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 124 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

About 14 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

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

Your largest element takes 7.1 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “For more than a decade-plus, I built, marketed, and grew so…”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 9.1 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

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

Chrome's UX Report (opens in a new tab) has too little real-visitor traffic for this site, so the figures here are lab measurements from Google's test phone on a throttled 4G connection.

5 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example holland-lake-hike.jpg at 1,920 px wide, shown at 322 px. Resized copies would save about 943 KiB.

6 images (1.2 MB) are JPEG, PNG or GIF. The same pictures as WebP or AVIF are usually much smaller at the same quality, and every current browser shows them.

4 images further down the page (1.0 MB) 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 0.47 g of CO₂e: 56.2 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

Some list items are not inside a list.

1 link inside paragraphs relies on colour alone to stand out.

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

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 22 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.

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

Your title is 83 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “Scott Mathson, Maker - Audio Engineer, Musician - Former Web & Marketing Consultant”.

Your meta description is 192 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

No Open Graph image, so links shared on LinkedIn, Slack or Facebook show no preview picture.

The homepage links to 29 pages on scottmathson.com and 47 external pages.

There is no Organization (or LocalBusiness) JSON-LD, so search engines and AI assistants have no machine-readable facts about who runs the site: its name, logo, profiles and contact details.

There is no https://scottmathson.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.

https://scottmathson.com/blog, https://scottmathson.com/about, https://scottmathson.com/blog/2021/11/01/cheapclassictrucks-experiment-domain-name-social-handle-review, https://scottmathson.com/blog/2021/09/15/thank-you-for-the-opportunity-automattic, https://scottmathson.com/blog/2021/04/23/canon-dslr-external-webcam-setup-for-better-laptop-video-quality and https://scottmathson.com/blog/2017/09/19/seo-beginner-guide-optimize-website-for-search and 4 others have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

We fetched 14 pages linked from your homepage and read each the way a search engine does.

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

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

Social proof on the homepage: 5 testimonial or review blocks. 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.

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 866 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager (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 4 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 5 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.