vanityfair.com website review

Not measured in this review.

• Fails Core Web Vitals for real visitors

  Real Chrome users on phones do not pass Google's Core Web Vitals on your site (28-day field data from the Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab)). Google uses this in ranking.

• Real-user CLS: 0.14

  0.14

  For real visitors the layout shifts by 0.14 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

• Tap response (INP) held steady for real visitors

  +1%

  Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 176 ms to 180 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

• Largest content (LCP) got 17% slower for real visitors

  +17%

  Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.4 s to 1.6 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

• Page weight: 10.3 MB

  10.3 MB

  Your homepage downloads 10.3 MB on a phone, 3.9 MB of it images (37%). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

• 2 images over 500 KB

  2 images weigh 1.5 MB together. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

  Elements (2)

• 35 images below the first screen load straight away

  35 images further down the page (2.4 MB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

  Elements (5)

• 2 images in older formats

  2 images (1.5 MB) are 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.

  Elements (2)

• About 2.9 g of CO₂ per visit

  2.93 g

  By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 2.93 g of CO₂e: 352.0 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

• 47 images without alt text

  47 images have no alt text, which hurts accessibility and image search.

  View source

• 1 link without text

  1 visible link has no text or label, so screen readers cannot say where it goes.

• Headings skip levels

  Headings skip levels (h1 → h3 and h3 → h6), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

  View source

• Title is long (69 characters)

  Your title is 69 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “Vanity Fair - Entertainment, Politics, and Fashion News | Vanity Fair”.

  View source

• No X (Twitter) card tag

  No twitter:card tag. X falls back to Open Graph, which is set, so this is minor.

• 86 internal links, 32 external

  The homepage links to 86 pages on vanityfair.com and 32 external pages.

• robots.txt blocks 4 AI answer engine crawlers

  4 of 6

  Your robots.txt shuts out 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.

• Organization data is thin (3 of 6 facts)

  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.

  View source

• No llms.txt

  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.

• Opted out of AI training for 4 crawlers

  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.

• 12 pages without an H1

  /hollywood, /culture, /news/politics, /style, /style/royals and /hollywood/award-season and 6 others have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

• 2 pages slow to respond

  /style/beauty and /video took over 3 s to send their HTML from our server.

• 15 internal pages checked

  We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 71 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

• 2 broken images

  2 images failed to load on a phone, for example https://bat.bing.com/action/0?ti=4015762&tm=gtm002&Ver=2&mid=028a6654-d74d-4bdd-975e-8278bb005469&bo=1&sid=a8705650d7e211f1b50e15f4998ecfbe&vid=a870bcb0d7e211f1adc6c3e0e20677b8&vids=1&msclkid=N&pi=918.

• 16 small tap targets

  16 of 62 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

• 6 JavaScript errors while loading

  6 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “[readmo] Readmo container does not exist!”.

• No HSTS header

  No Strict-Transport-Security header, so browsers may still try plain http first on a return visit.

• No Referrer-Policy

  No Referrer-Policy header, so full URLs can leak to the sites you link to.

• No Permissions-Policy

  No Permissions-Policy header to switch off camera, microphone and location for embedded content.

• No security.txt

  There is no /.well-known/security.txt telling researchers how to report a security problem to you.

• No CAA record

  vanityfair.com has no CAA record, so any certificate authority may issue a certificate for it. A CAA record naming your provider (for example letsencrypt.org) closes that door.

• DNSSEC is off

  vanityfair.com's DNS answers are not signed. DNSSEC stops attackers forging them to send visitors or email elsewhere; most registrars switch it on in a click, though most sites still run without it.

• No analytics detected

  No analytics or tag manager detected in the HTML, so you can't measure whether any of these fixes work.

• No direct contact details

  No phone number or email link on the homepage, so ready-to-buy visitors have one fewer way to reach you.

• No risk reducer

  No guarantee or risk reducer (money-back, free trial, no credit card) is mentioned, which is often what tips a hesitant visitor.

• About 1,564 words of copy

  The homepage carries about 1,564 words of visible text.

• Email authentication score: 100/100

  Email authentication: SPF record 25 points, plus 15 when it ends in -all (10 for ~all); DMARC record 25, plus 25 for a reject policy (15 for quarantine); a DKIM key on a common selector 10.

• 13 trackers load before any consent

  13

  Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Amazon Ads, Comscore, Criteo, Google Ads and Google Tag Manager and 8 mores (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.

• 51 cookies set on arrival

  51

  Opening the homepage sets 51 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

• No consent tool detected

  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.

• 88 other companies contacted

  Loading the homepage contacts 88 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.