stltoday.com website review

About 1.4 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 4.0 s faster on a phone.

21 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 4.2 s.

A phone's processor spends 15.5 s on main-thread work while loading, 9.0 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 1.1 s of main-thread work and 1.1 MB of downloads while your page loads. That alone is enough to make taps feel slow. Loading it after the page is usable, or only on the pages that need it, takes that off the critical path.

Your mobile performance score is 27. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, reddit and Facebook and others), adding 3.3 MB and 4.5 s of main-thread time.

59 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (966 KiB).

reddit costs a phone 844 ms of main-thread work and 27 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.

About 114 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.

Facebook costs a phone 613 ms of main-thread work and 312 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.

Osano CMP costs a phone 594 ms of main-thread work and 137 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 448 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Pubmatic costs a phone 437 ms of main-thread work and 57 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.

The page has 2,822 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

Polyfills for old browsers add 56 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

4 images could be 28 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

17 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.

1 KiB JavaScript is shipped twice across bundles.

Real Chrome users on phones do not pass Google's Core Web Vitals on this page (28-day field data from the Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab)). Google uses this in ranking.

The first text or image appears after 8.1 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 13.4 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Allie Schallert, Post-Dispatch”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 40.9 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 3.1 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Visually, the page fills in at 9.9 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

For real visitors the layout shifts by 0.17 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 172 ms to 205 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.7 s to 1.7 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 5.1 MB in 825 requests on a phone: scripts 3.6 MB (78), other files 829 KiB (493) and images 314 KiB (171). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 1.45 g of CO₂e: 174.1 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

1 image has no alt text, which hurts accessibility and image search.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 3 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

Elements marked as presentational should be consistently ignored: 4 elements on the page fail this check, rated minor by axe-core.

Elements with visible text labels do not have matching accessible names. (5 elements).

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

Your title is 187 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “St. Louis Post-Dispatch | Breaking News | Read St. Louis, MO and Missouri breaking news. …”.

Your meta description is 172 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

Structured data found (Organization) but with 8 problems, for example “Organization: missing name”.

3 links have no real href, so search engines can't follow them.

The homepage links to 307 pages on stltoday.com and 33 external pages.

Your robots.txt shuts out ChatGPT search (OAI-SearchBot), 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, 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 https://www.stltoday.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.

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.

https://www.stltoday.com/news-tip and https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/column/winning-stl have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

Your homepage links to 1 page by a URL that isn't its canonical one, for example https://www.stltoday.com/news-tip, whose canonical is https://www.stltoday.com/forms/online_services/submit_news. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/business/workplaces and https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/column/winning-stl have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 176 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

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

6 of 19 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

6 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 429 ()”.

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

Your homepage shows a street address but no LocalBusiness JSON-LD, so Google and AI assistants have to guess your address, hours and phone from the page text.

A local customer looking to call finds no phone number on the homepage. Add one, ideally as a tap-to-call link.

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

The homepage shows no opening hours. If customers visit or call, show when.

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 1,078 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Criteo, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Meta Pixel and 3 mores (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (Osano) is installed; check it blocks these until visitors agree where the law requires it.

Opening the homepage sets 17 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 49 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.