thedodo.com website review

About 988 KiB 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.

101 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (994 KiB).

Your mobile performance score is 31 (desktop: 54). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

A phone's processor spends 7.1 s on main-thread work while loading, 4.6 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Google/Doubleclick Ads and Integral Ad Science and others), adding 2.2 MB and 2.0 s of main-thread time.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 781 ms of main-thread work and 512 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.

Polyfills for old browsers add 108 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 450 ms faster on a phone.

Google/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 365 ms of main-thread work and 654 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 285 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

The page has 1,902 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

Optanon costs a phone 79 ms of main-thread work and 325 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.

5 images could be 36 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

About 22 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

13 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.

Your largest element takes 24.1 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Deputy Sprints Down Highway To Save A Tiny Baby — And It Ch…”.

Visually, the page fills in at 17.9 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 49.1 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

The first text or image appears after 7.4 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 1.3 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 1.0 s to 1.8 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 5.1 MB in 667 requests on a phone: scripts 3.1 MB (84), images 769 KiB (214) and HTML 541 KiB (57). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

2 images further down the page (53 KiB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 1.44 g of CO₂e: 173.0 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

2 tap targets are too small or too close together to hit reliably with a finger.

1 text element doesn't have enough contrast against the background to read easily, especially outdoors on a phone.

Interactive controls must not be nested: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated serious by axe-core.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 97 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Headings should not be empty: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated minor by axe-core.

ARIA role should be appropriate for the element: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated minor by axe-core.

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 28 characters: “The Dodo - For Animal People”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

Structured data found (Organization and WebSite) but with 1 problem, for example “WebSite: missing name”.

The homepage links to 219 pages on thedodo.com and 44 external pages.

Your robots.txt shuts out ChatGPT (ChatGPT-User), 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 https://www.thedodo.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.

https://www.thedodo.com/dog-stories, https://www.thedodo.com/cat-stories, https://www.thedodo.com/best-trip-ever and https://www.thedodo.com/for-the-family use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

Your homepage links to 3 pages by a URL that isn't their canonical one, for example https://www.thedodo.com/pets, whose canonical is https://www.thedodo.com/topics/pets. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

https://www.thedodo.com/newsletters, https://www.thedodo.com/pets, https://www.thedodo.com/topics/adoption, https://www.thedodo.com/dog-stories, https://www.thedodo.com/cat-stories and https://www.thedodo.com/best-trip-ever and 9 others have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 115 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

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

The page uses 2 deprecated browser APIs that will stop working in future browsers (“The Topics API is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.”).

5 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Access to fetch at 'https://api.rlcdn.com/api/identity/envelope?pid=13292' from origin 'https://www.thedodo.com' has be…”.

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

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 phone number or email link on the homepage, so ready-to-buy visitors have one fewer way to reach you.

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 1,030 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Amazon Ads, Comscore, Criteo, Google Ads and Google Analytics and 4 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 24 cookies, 1 of them by other companies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 68 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.