seattletimes.com website review

152 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (1.4 MB).

About 966 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.4 s faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 39 (desktop: 44). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

A phone's processor spends 7.8 s on main-thread work while loading, 4.3 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (mrf.io, Google Tag Manager and Pubmatic and others), adding 1.6 MB and 2.1 s of main-thread time.

18 images could be 618 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

14 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 600 ms.

mrf.io costs a phone 484 ms of main-thread work and 100 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 357 ms of main-thread work and 382 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.

Pubmatic costs a phone 315 ms of main-thread work and 110 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 235 ms of main-thread work and 464 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 1,801 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 223 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 150 ms).

Polyfills for old browsers add 8 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.

Your largest element takes 13.5 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Cooper Kupp is ruled just sh…”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 39.1 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 8.2 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 1.2 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

The first text or image appears after 2.7 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 123 ms to 113 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

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

Your homepage downloads 4.9 MB in 1,011 requests on a phone: scripts 2.7 MB (98), images 1.3 MB (230) and other files 511 KiB (499). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 1.40 g of CO₂e: 168.3 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

<html> element must have a lang attribute: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated serious by axe-core.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 2 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.

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

1 text element doesn't have enough contrast against the background to read easily, especially outdoors on a phone.

Your title is 145 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “The Seattle Times | Local news, sports, business, politics, entertainment, travel, restau…”.

Structured data found (Organization and WebSite) but with 2 problems, for example “Organization: missing name”.

No Open Graph image (also missing: og:title, og:description), so links shared on LinkedIn, Slack or Facebook show no preview picture.

Your <h1> is empty.

No twitter:card tag. X falls back to Open Graph, which is incomplete here.

The homepage links to 234 pages on seattletimes.com and 39 external pages.

Your robots.txt shuts out ChatGPT search (OAI-SearchBot), ChatGPT (ChatGPT-User), Claude search (Claude-SearchBot), 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.

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

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 117 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

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

The page uses 1 deprecated browser API that will stop working in future browsers (“Unload event listeners are deprecated and will be removed.”).

1 error was logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 403 ()”.

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

Requests the notification permission on page load.

Large scripts ship without source maps.

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.

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

There is no form on the homepage, so every lead has to click through to another page first.

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 1 cookie (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 1 host run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.