technologyreview.com website review

A phone's processor spends 31.1 s on main-thread work while loading, 19.0 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

Cloudflare CDN costs a phone 3.0 s of main-thread work and 500 KiB 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.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 2.8 s of main-thread work and 738 KiB 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.

Google/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 2.0 s of main-thread work and 841 KiB 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.

7 images could be 447 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 1.0 s faster on a phone.

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 (Cloudflare CDN, Google Tag Manager and Google/Doubleclick Ads and others), adding 2.6 MB and 10.2 s of main-thread time.

62 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (1.6 MB).

20 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 1.9 s. During a long task the page ignores taps.

About 1.2 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page.

reddit costs a phone 952 ms of main-thread work and 47 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.

Facebook costs a phone 711 ms of main-thread work and 255 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.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 550 ms).

The page has 2,660 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

About 260 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

Polyfills for old browsers add 40 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.

Scripts make the browser recalculate the layout repeatedly while the page loads, which wastes processor time on phones.

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.

For real visitors the layout shifts by 0.55 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

Visually, the page fills in at 31.0 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 12.8 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

The page becomes fully interactive after 40.4 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

The layout shifts by 0.483 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

Real visitors wait 3.0 s for the largest content to appear (75th percentile). Good is under 2.5 s.

Real visitors wait 215 ms for the page to respond to a tap (75th percentile). Good is under 200 ms.

Real visitors wait 1.1 s for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

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 “Illustration of two robots arms pulling identically sliced …”.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 163 ms to 193 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 5.6 MB in 293 requests on a phone: scripts 3.8 MB (120), images 807 KiB (29) and fonts 364 KiB (14). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

1 image further down the page (57 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 1.58 g of CO₂e: 189.3 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

1 button has no accessible name, so screen readers announce just “button”.

3 frames have no title, so screen-reader users cannot tell what they contain.

ARIA dialog and alertdialog nodes should have an accessible name: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated serious by axe-core.

75 visible links have no text or label, so screen readers cannot say where they go.

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

Elements with visible text labels do not have matching accessible names. (1 element).

Your title is only 21 characters: “MIT Technology Review”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

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

The homepage links to 255 pages on technologyreview.com and 49 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 url, logo, sameAs (social profiles), 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, 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.

/tag/the-big-story, /topic/artificial-intelligence, /topic/biotechnology and /topic/climate-change have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

/tag/the-big-story, /topic/artificial-intelligence, /topic/biotechnology and /topic/climate-change have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 101 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 image failed to load on a phone, for example https://bat.bing.com/action/0?ti=16002556&tm=gtm002&Ver=2&mid=186db7f8-d4de-42ca-9c41-d98f9661e332&bo=1&sid=c3e9c230d7e211f1a90e071769a8276f&vid=c3e9eb40d7e211f19bf99ff0f5929c6f&vids=1&msclkid=N&pi=91.

14 of 30 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

The page uses 1 deprecated browser API that will stop working in future browsers (“Unload event listeners are deprecated and will be removed.”).

3 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: net::ERR_FAILED”.

No testimonials, customer logos, ratings or customer counts on the homepage: nothing tells a new visitor that others already trust you.

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.

There is no link to Google or Apple Maps. A directions link is one tap for a phone visitor.

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 7,405 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Amazon Ads, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Hotjar and 6 mores (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (OneTrust) is installed; check it blocks these until visitors agree where the law requires it.

Opening the homepage sets 38 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 48 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.