spareroom.com website review

About 305 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.

44 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (430 KiB).

Your mobile performance score is 62 (desktop: 74). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Facebook and Hotjar and others), adding 807 KiB and 758 ms of main-thread time.

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

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 406 ms of main-thread work and 384 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.

7 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 183 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

2 images could be 17 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

Polyfills for old browsers add 12 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 9.6 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “Where would you like to find a room for rent or roommate? U…”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 9.8 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 419 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Visually, the page fills in at 4.5 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

14 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 144 ms to 147 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 0.9 s to 0.9 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.35 g of CO₂e: 41.9 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

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

No XML sitemap at https://www.spareroom.com/sitemap.xml, so Google discovers your pages only by following links.

The homepage links to only 3 pages on your own site, so visitors and crawlers find few routes into the rest of it.

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

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://www.spareroom.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.

We fetched 2 pages linked from your homepage and read each the way a search engine does.

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

We found no call-to-action buttons or links (such as “Book a demo” or “Get a quote”) anywhere on the homepage.

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

No guarantee or risk reducer (money-back, free trial, no credit card) is mentioned, which is often what tips a hesitant visitor.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Hotjar and Meta Pixel (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 13 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 15 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.