stephenn.com website review

11 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (3.0 MB).

10 images could be 3.0 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 450 ms faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 86. Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

About 70 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 450 ms faster on a phone.

1 file blocks the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining it could save about 150 ms.

2 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics), adding 165 KiB and 123 ms of main-thread time.

2 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 84 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Your largest element takes 3.9 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 3.6 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 3.9 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

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

Chrome's UX Report (opens in a new tab) has too little real-visitor traffic for this site, so the figures here are lab measurements from Google's test phone on a throttled 4G connection.

2023-08-04-go-gophers-building-db-castle.png weighs 1.8 MB. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

Your homepage downloads 3.5 MB in 14 requests on a phone: images 3.3 MB (10), scripts 164 KiB (1) and HTML 10 KiB (1). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

5 images (2.7 MB) 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.

2024-03-17-elephants-sorting.jpeg is on the first screen but marked loading="lazy", so the browser waits before fetching it and the page looks finished later. Load it eagerly (and give it fetchpriority="high" if it is the main image).

4 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example 2023-08-04-go-gophers-building-db-castle.png at 1,024 px wide, shown at 332 px. Resized copies would save about 182 KiB.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.98 g of CO₂e: 117.7 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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.

Page should contain a level-one heading: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

No meta description, so Google writes its own snippet from whatever text it finds.

There is no <h1>, so neither visitors nor Google get a clear main headline.

Your title is only 19 characters: “Stephen's Tech Blog”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

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

The homepage links to 34 pages on stephenn.com and 14 external pages.

Your Organization JSON-LD is missing logo, 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.

/tweets has 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 32 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

10 of 16 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

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 404 ()”.

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 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.

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 2,191 words of visible text.

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