today.com website review

93 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (1.2 MB).

16 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 1.6 s.

nbcnews.com costs a phone 1.1 s of main-thread work and 1.3 MB 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.

Your mobile performance score is 24. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

A phone's processor spends 9.0 s on main-thread work while loading, 5.1 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

The page has 3,791 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (nbcnews.com, Taboola and mPulse and others), adding 3.3 MB and 3.0 s of main-thread time.

About 1.8 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

About 202 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 460 ms faster on a phone.

Taboola costs a phone 542 ms of main-thread work and 954 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.

mPulse costs a phone 461 ms of main-thread work and 60 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 338 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Adobe Tag Manager costs a phone 169 ms of main-thread work and 332 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 images could be 167 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

Polyfills for old browsers add 96 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

41 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.

2 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

Your largest element takes 10.5 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image.

The page becomes fully interactive after 40.9 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 12.7 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 2.1 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

The first text or image appears after 3.8 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

The layout shifts by 0.158 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

1 image have no width and height attributes, so the layout jumps as each one loads.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 148 ms to 171 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.9 s to 1.8 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 5.7 MB in 371 requests on a phone: scripts 4.6 MB (160), images 354 KiB (75) and other files 317 KiB (102). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

260805-julie-ricevuto-kb-main-1-65ae69.jpg is on the first screen but marked loading="lazy", so the browser waits before fetching it and the page looks finished later. Load it eagerly (and give it fetchpriority="high" if it is the main image).

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 1.62 g of CO₂e: 194.6 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 tap targets are too small or too close together to hit reliably with a finger.

2 text elements don't have enough contrast against the background to read easily, especially outdoors on a phone.

Scrollable region must have keyboard access: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated serious by axe-core.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 214 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

Landmarks should have a unique role or role/label/title (i.e. accessible name) combination: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

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

Alternative text of images should not be repeated as text: 13 elements on the page fail this check, rated minor by axe-core.

Elements with visible text labels do not have matching accessible names. (2 elements).

There is no <h1>, so neither visitors nor Google get a clear main headline.

Your title is 73 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “Latest News, Videos & Guest Interviews from the Today Show on NBC | TODAY”.

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

15 links use generic text like “click here” or “learn more”, which tells Google nothing about the page behind them.

The homepage links to 421 pages on today.com and 25 external pages.

Your robots.txt shuts out ChatGPT search (OAI-SearchBot), 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 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 /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.

Your homepage links to 1 page by a URL that isn't its canonical one, for example /about/today/about-today-nbc-rcna150631, whose canonical is /about/today-rcna226078. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

/show-archives took over 3 s to send its HTML from our server.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 194 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 image failed to load on a phone, for example https://tvspix.com/t.png?&t=1791754858177&l=tvscientific-pix-o-9316482f-e7e3-4988-af00-f3e680e16bca&u3=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.today.com%2F.

58 of 108 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

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

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

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

Social proof on the homepage: 2 trust badges. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

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.

There is no form on the homepage, so every lead has to click through to another page first.

The homepage carries about 2,313 words of visible text.

The page uses urgency cues (a countdown or limited-time wording).

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Amazon Ads, Amplitude, Comscore, Criteo and Google Ads 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 43 cookies, 1 of them by other companies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 67 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.