thegrotto.org website review

35 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 2.6 s.

5 images could be 860 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 1.6 s faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 70 (desktop: 87). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

About 635 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (givecloud.co, Google Tag Manager and Facebook and others), adding 1.2 MB and 473 ms of main-thread time.

6 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (540 KiB).

givecloud.co costs a phone 187 ms of main-thread work and 541 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 CDN costs a phone 74 ms of main-thread work and 347 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.

6 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 211 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

About 31 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

Polyfills for old browsers add 29 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.

Your largest element takes 6.5 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “Welcome to The Grotto The National Sanctuary of Our Sorrowf…”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 13.7 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Real visitors wait 893 ms for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

The first text or image appears after 2.7 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 4.4 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-17, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 73 ms to 73 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 3.0 MB in 86 requests on a phone: scripts 1.4 MB (29), images 1.3 MB (9) and fonts 272 KiB (7). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

1 image (81 KiB) is 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.

1 image further down the page (81 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 0.86 g of CO₂e: 103.2 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 41 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

Headings skip levels (h1 → h5), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

There are 3 <h1> headlines (“Welcome to The Grotto”, “Pray With Us” and “Pray With Us”). One clear main headline is easier for people and search engines.

The homepage links to 211 pages on thegrotto.org and 10 external pages.

Your Organization JSON-LD is missing 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 https://thegrotto.org/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.

https://thegrotto.org/visit, https://thegrotto.org/visit/hours-admission, https://thegrotto.org/visit/gardens, https://thegrotto.org/visit/annual-garden-pass, https://thegrotto.org/upper-gardens-temporary-closure and https://thegrotto.org/visit/directions and 9 others have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 45 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

On a phone, there is no call to action on the first screen: visitors have to scroll to find out what to do next.

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.

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 620 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Meta Pixel (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 6 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 16 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.