state.il.us website review

About 883 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.3 s faster on a phone.

5 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 2.5 s.

12 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (310 KiB).

Your mobile performance score is 59 (desktop: 77). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

About 91 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 600 ms faster on a phone.

6 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 540 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

4 images could be 70 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

Polyfills for old browsers add 35 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

6 third-party services load with your homepage (Adobe Tag Manager, weglot.us and Siteimprove and others), adding 537 KiB and 309 ms of main-thread time.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 200 ms).

25 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.

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 “Welcome to Illinois.gov! Find places to go, things to see. …”.

The first text or image appears after 5.8 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 9.6 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 6.2 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 86 ms to 89 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.5 s to 1.5 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

2 images (74 KiB) 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.

1 image further down the page (33 KiB) download before anyone scrolls to it. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.40 g of CO₂e: 47.5 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Your title is only 8 characters: “Illinois”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

No structured data (JSON-LD), so Google can't show rich results such as your logo, ratings or FAQs.

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

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

The homepage links to 35 pages on state.il.us and 11 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.

The HTML your server sends has 159 of the 304 words a browser shows. AI crawlers don't run JavaScript, so they miss the rest.

There is no https://www.illinois.gov/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 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.

https://www.illinois.gov/services/service.road-conditions.html, https://www.illinois.gov/services/service.certify-unemployment-benefits.html, https://www.illinois.gov/services/service.professional-license-look-up.html, https://www.illinois.gov/services/service.state-jobs.html, https://www.illinois.gov/services/service.renew-driver.html and https://www.illinois.gov/services/service.sex-offenders.html all use the title “Service”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

https://www.illinois.gov/government.html, https://www.illinois.gov/business.html, https://www.illinois.gov/employment.html, https://www.illinois.gov/education.html, https://www.illinois.gov/residents.html and https://www.illinois.gov/visiting.html and 8 others have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

Your homepage links to 6 pages by a URL that isn't their canonical one, for example https://www.illinois.gov/services/service.road-conditions.html, whose canonical is https://www.illinois.gov/services/service.html. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

https://www.illinois.gov/about/live-video.html, https://www.illinois.gov/search-results.html, https://www.illinois.gov/about/communications-opt-in.html, https://www.illinois.gov/services/service.road-conditions.html, https://www.illinois.gov/services/service.certify-unemployment-benefits.html and https://www.illinois.gov/services/service.professional-license-look-up.html and 3 others have under 150 words in the HTML. Thin pages rarely rank; if the text loads with JavaScript, crawlers that don't run it see even less.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 30 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

3 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 (“Synchronous `XMLHttpRequest` on the main thread is deprecated because of its detrimental effects to…”).

2 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Access to XMLHttpRequest at 'https://cdn.weglot.us/weglot.min.css?v=11' from origin 'https://www.illinois.gov' has been…”.

1 image is displayed at the wrong aspect ratio, so it looks stretched or squashed.

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

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 analytics or tag manager detected in the HTML, so you can't measure whether any of these fixes work.

No phone number or email link on the homepage, so ready-to-buy visitors have one fewer way to reach you.

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.

The homepage carries about 304 words of visible text.

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