snopes.com website review

About 292 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 1.5 s faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 57 (desktop: 99). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

6 images could be 162 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 650 ms faster on a phone.

2 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 450 ms.

6 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and Scorecard Research and others), adding 236 KiB and 261 ms of main-thread time.

About 92 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 190 ms faster on a phone.

7 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 218 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

3 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (20 KiB).

Desktop scores 99 but mobile only 57. A gap that wide usually means heavy scripts and images that hit phones hardest.

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.

Your largest element takes 8.9 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Trump flags fly as rioters take over the steps of the Capit…”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 8.9 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 522 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Visually, the page fills in at 4.4 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The first text or image appears after 2.2 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

3 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 92 ms to 97 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).

1 image is downloaded at several times the size a phone draws it, for example ifcn_badge.png at 414 px wide, shown at 113 px. Resized copies would save about 28 KiB.

1 image (84 KiB) is 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.

2 images further down the page (108 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 0.33 g of CO₂e: 39.6 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

<svg> elements with an img or image role must have alternative text: 11 elements on the page fail this check, rated serious by axe-core.

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

Elements must only use permitted ARIA attributes: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated serious by axe-core.

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.

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

Headings skip levels (h1 → h3 and h2 → h4), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

Your title is 131 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “Snopes.com | The definitive fact-checking site and reference source for urban legends, fo…”.

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

1 link has no real href, so search engines can't follow it.

No twitter:card tag. X falls back to Open Graph, which is set, so this is minor.

The homepage links to 130 pages on snopes.com and 10 external pages.

Your robots.txt shuts out 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 name, 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, 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.

/support and /tips all use the title “Support Snopes With Our Monthly Membership | Snopes.com”, and 1 other title repeat too. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

/support and /tips use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

Your homepage links to 2 pages by a URL that isn't their canonical one, for example /fact-checks, whose canonical is /fact-check. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

/contact, /latest, /top, /category/politics, /category/Entertainment and /fact-check and 4 others have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 85 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

26 of 45 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

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: 3 trust badges. 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.

The homepage carries about 1,300 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Comscore, Criteo, Google Ads, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager and 2 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 35 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.