vermontpublic.org website review

About 2.4 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 6.1 s faster on a phone.

59 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (1.8 MB).

9 images could be 583 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.1 s faster on a phone.

YouTube costs a phone 1.1 s of main-thread work and 2.5 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 28. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

A phone's processor spends 7.9 s on main-thread work while loading, 4.6 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (YouTube, Google Tag Manager and Google/Doubleclick Ads and others), adding 6.8 MB and 3.5 s of main-thread time.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 971 ms of main-thread work and 944 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/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 426 ms of main-thread work and 721 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 489 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

About 178 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.

2 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 450 ms.

brightspotcdn.com costs a phone 219 ms of main-thread work and 1.4 MB 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.

Facebook costs a phone 235 ms of main-thread work and 317 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.

The page has 2,025 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

Polyfills for old browsers add 58 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 50 ms).

Critical files load one after another instead of in parallel (3 chains). Preconnecting to key origins and preloading the hero image shortens the chain.

Your largest element takes 16.2 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “Live updates: Scott wins reelection, Gray unseats Rodgers”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 42.5 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

The first text or image appears after 6.2 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 10.2 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 2.0 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 98 ms to 108 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.7 s to 1.6 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 7.2 MB in 199 requests on a phone: scripts 4.6 MB (71), images 1.2 MB (32) and fonts 795 KiB (14). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

1 image is downloaded at several times the size a phone draws it, for example election-2026-logo-transparent.png at 2,711 px wide, shown at 170 px. Resized copies would save about 403 KiB.

1 image (418 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.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 2.04 g of CO₂e: 244.8 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

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

2 frames have no title, so screen-reader users cannot tell what they contain.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 5 elements on the page fail 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.

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

Your meta description is 196 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

The homepage links to 372 pages on vermontpublic.org and 86 external pages.

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 https://www.vermontpublic.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.

robots.txt blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-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, which the crawlers above handle.

https://www.vermontpublic.org/show/rumble-strip is marked noindex but linked from your homepage. If it is meant to be found, remove the noindex.

https://www.vermontpublic.org/podcast/the-frequency-daily-vermont-news, https://www.vermontpublic.org/show/vermont-edition, https://www.vermontpublic.org/podcast/brave-little-state, https://www.vermontpublic.org/show/vermont-this-week, https://www.vermontpublic.org/show/sports-rapport and https://www.vermontpublic.org/show/rumble-strip and 4 others have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 94 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

9 of 31 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

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

4 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Uncaught Error: Prohibited read from data layer variable: event.”.

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

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.

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

The homepage shows no opening hours. If customers visit or call, show when.

Your phone number appears as text but isn't a tel: link, so phone visitors can't tap to call.

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

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 489 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixel and Microsoft Clarity and 1 more (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 20 cookies, 1 of them by other companies (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 42 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.