slate.com website review

62 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (860 KiB).

Your mobile performance score is 38 (desktop: 52). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

A phone's processor spends 7.7 s on main-thread work while loading, 4.4 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

About 2.0 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 900 ms faster on a phone.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Taboola, Google CDN and piano.io and others), adding 3.2 MB and 2.1 s of main-thread time.

2 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 900 ms.

Taboola costs a phone 631 ms of main-thread work and 1,021 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 CDN costs a phone 415 ms of main-thread work and 1.1 MB 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.

piano.io costs a phone 217 ms of main-thread work and 450 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 152 ms of main-thread work and 304 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 243 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

About 185 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

Polyfills for old browsers add 128 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

2 images could be 107 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

6 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.

2 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

The page becomes fully interactive after 45.5 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Your largest element takes 9.3 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image.

Visually, the page fills in at 12.5 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 1.3 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

The first text or image appears after 2.3 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 121 ms to 111 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 1.1 s to 1.1 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 6.3 MB in 584 requests on a phone: scripts 4.3 MB (92), other files 895 KiB (290) and fonts 414 KiB (11). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

1 image is downloaded at several times the size a phone draws it, for example 3dc4bd4f-68a1-4235-954f-30a71fd60171.png at 680 px wide, shown at 173 px. Resized copies would save about 46 KiB.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 1.80 g of CO₂e: 215.6 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

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

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

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.

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

Elements with visible text labels do not have matching accessible names. (2 elements).

There are 4 <h1> headlines (“It’s Slate’s 30th Birthday!”, “Sign up for Your Morning Slate” and “Get the Latest Slate Advice Delivered To Your Inb…”). One clear main headline is easier for people and search engines.

Structured data found (NewsArticle) but with 3 problems, for example “NewsArticle: missing name”.

1 link use generic text like “click here” or “learn more”, which tells Google nothing about the page behind it.

The homepage links to 182 pages on slate.com and 16 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 /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, which the crawlers above handle.

/plus has no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 102 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

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

The page uses 2 deprecated browser APIs that will stop working in future browsers (“The Topics API is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.”).

5 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “3000ms timeout exceeded”.

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

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.

Social proof on the homepage: 1 trust badge. 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 1,551 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Amazon Ads, Amplitude, Criteo, Google Ads and Google Tag Manager and 6 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 39 cookies, 1 of them by other companies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 68 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.