themuse.com website review

About 345 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 1.6 s faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 58 (desktop: 87). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

12 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 750 ms.

About 83 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 450 ms faster on a phone.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 364 ms of main-thread work and 499 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.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and LinkedIn Ads and others), adding 575 KiB and 410 ms of main-thread time.

5 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 145 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

6 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (36 KiB).

Polyfills for old browsers add 12 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

Desktop scores 87 but mobile only 58. 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.

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 10.2 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Career professionals finding meaningful work”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 11.4 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

The first text or image appears after 4.1 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 6.0 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

For real visitors the layout shifts by 0.12 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

Real visitors see the first content after 1.8 s (75th percentile). Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 1.2 s for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 223 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-17, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.2 s to 2.4 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.41 g of CO₂e: 48.8 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

The homepage links to 106 pages on themuse.com and 11 external pages.

There is no https://www.themuse.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.

Your homepage links to https://www.themuse.com/companies/nike-inc, which answers with an error. Visitors hit a dead end and search engines drop it.

https://www.themuse.com/user/terms and https://www.themuse.com/user/privacy use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

Your homepage links to 4 pages by a URL that isn't their canonical one, for example https://www.themuse.com/advice, whose canonical is https://www.themuse.com/author/undefined. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

https://www.themuse.com/profiles/capitalone, https://www.themuse.com/profiles/koalafi, https://www.themuse.com/profiles/sandianationallaboratories and https://www.themuse.com/companies/allbirds have under 150 words in the HTML. Thin pages rarely rank; if the text loads with JavaScript, crawlers that don't run it see even less.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 41 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 error was logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Minified React error #418; visit https://react.dev/errors/418?args[]=HTML&args[]= for the full message or use the non-m…”.

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

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.

Social proof on the homepage: 6 customer or partner logos. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

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 1,647 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and LinkedIn Insight (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 10 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.