the-sun.com website review

92 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (1.8 MB).

About 1.6 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 3.1 s faster on a phone.

A phone's processor spends 11.8 s on main-thread work while loading, 6.8 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

Your mobile performance score is 28 (desktop: 67). 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, Google/Doubleclick Ads and Facebook and others), adding 2.8 MB and 2.3 s of main-thread time.

1 file blocks the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining it could save about 800 ms.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 657 ms of main-thread work and 945 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.

Google/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 472 ms of main-thread work and 601 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 460 ms of main-thread work and 335 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.

24 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

20 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 278 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

The page has 2,284 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

Opta costs a phone 163 ms of main-thread work and 338 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 53 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 210 ms faster on a phone.

Polyfills for old browsers add 89 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

3 images could be 72 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 100 ms faster on a phone.

Desktop scores 67 but mobile only 28. A gap that wide usually means heavy scripts and images that hit phones hardest.

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.

The first text or image appears after 8.9 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 15.6 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “Houthi rebels blitz Riyadh airport AGAIN & claim deadly att…”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 44.0 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 12.3 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 1.8 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.9 s to 1.7 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 9.3 MB in 667 requests on a phone: media 4.3 MB (2), scripts 3.9 MB (108) and other files 374 KiB (334). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 2.64 g of CO₂e: 316.8 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.

The page has no <main> landmark, so screen-reader users cannot jump straight to the content.

The viewport tag blocks pinch-zoom, which low-vision visitors rely on.

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

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Your robots.txt disallows the whole site for every crawler, so search engines are told to stay out.

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 16 characters: “Verifying Device”. 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 canonical URL, so duplicate versions of the homepage (with or without www, with tracking parameters) can split ranking signals.

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

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

The homepage links to only 0 pages on your own site, so visitors and crawlers find few routes into the rest of it.

No favicon is declared in the HTML, so browser tabs and Google's mobile results may show a generic icon.

1 link has no real href, so search engines can't follow it.

No twitter:card tag. X falls back to Open Graph, which is incomplete here.

Your robots.txt shuts out Claude search (Claude-SearchBot), Claude (Claude-User), Perplexity (PerplexityBot) and Perplexity (Perplexity-User). These fetch pages to answer people's questions and cite the source, so your site can't be quoted or linked in those answers.

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.the-sun.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 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.

43 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 (“The Topics API is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.”).

2 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Access to XMLHttpRequest at 'https://p.toadmash.net/toadmash-1.0.11.css' from origin 'https://www.the-sun.com' has been…”.

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

Large scripts ship without source maps.

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.

The homepage has only about 7 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.

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