va.gov website review

About 908 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.1 s faster on a phone.

Amazon Web Services costs a phone 1.0 s of main-thread work and 934 KiB 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 14 (desktop: 50). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

A phone's processor spends 4.5 s on main-thread work while loading, 2.6 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

4 third-party services load with your homepage (Amazon Web Services, Google Tag Manager and digitalgov.gov and others), adding 1.5 MB and 2.0 s of main-thread time.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 945 ms of main-thread work and 627 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.

12 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 587 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 450 ms).

4 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 400 ms.

About 67 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

3 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (242 KiB).

Polyfills for old browsers add 42 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 200 ms faster on a phone.

14 KiB JavaScript is shipped twice across bundles.

Desktop scores 50 but mobile only 14. A gap that wide usually means heavy scripts and images that hit phones hardest.

1 image could be 9 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

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.

For real visitors the layout shifts by 0.60 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

Your largest element takes 8.7 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “Severe weather affecting your area? Use the find VA locatio…”.

The layout shifts by 0.833 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 1.9 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

The page becomes fully interactive after 13.4 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 6.5 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The first text or image appears after 2.6 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

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 150 ms to 147 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 2.4 s to 2.9 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 2.2 MB in 62 requests on a phone: scripts 1.8 MB (41), other files 125 KiB (8) and stylesheets 90 KiB (4). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.61 g of CO₂e: 73.4 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

No structured data (JSON-LD), so Google can't show rich results such as your logo, ratings or FAQs.

The homepage links to only 2 pages on your own site, so visitors and crawlers find few routes into the rest of it.

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.

/find-locations has no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

/find-locations has no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

/find-locations has 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 1 page linked from your homepage and read each the way a search engine does.

2 of 6 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

2 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Access to fetch at 'https://eauth.va.gov/keepalive' from origin 'https://www.va.gov' has been blocked by CORS policy: N…”.

Social proof on the homepage: 1 trust badge. 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.

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 432 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager (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 17 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 4 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.