wcvb.com website review

About 2.0 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 7.1 s faster on a phone.

29 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (3.4 MB).

Your mobile performance score is 37 (desktop: 62). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

A phone's processor spends 5.2 s on main-thread work while loading, 2.5 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (weather.com, Google Tag Manager and Other Google APIs/SDKs and others), adding 3.7 MB and 1.4 s of main-thread time.

12 images could be 600 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

weather.com costs a phone 403 ms of main-thread work and 1.2 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.

Polyfills for old browsers add 46 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 350 ms faster on a phone.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 345 ms of main-thread work and 491 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.

Other Google APIs/SDKs costs a phone 167 ms of main-thread work and 547 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.

htvapps.com costs a phone 79 ms of main-thread work and 1.1 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.

Google/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 127 ms of main-thread work and 315 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 194 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 100 ms).

Desktop scores 62 but mobile only 37. 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.

Scripts make the browser recalculate the layout repeatedly while the page loads, which wastes processor time on phones.

4 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

The first text or image appears after 12.1 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 25.7 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the element shown below.

The page becomes fully interactive after 40.0 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 13.7 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 758 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 149 ms to 182 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

21 images 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' largest content (lcp) went from 2.1 s to 1.9 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 8.6 MB in 238 requests on a phone: scripts 3.7 MB (68), media 2.4 MB (1) and images 1.4 MB (85). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

2 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example 5c9ad164-3a7c-4c30-a546-119e485edd76.png at 1,215 px wide, shown at 120 px. Resized copies would save about 226 KiB.

3 images further down the page (285 KiB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

2 images (144 KiB) 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.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 2.43 g of CO₂e: 291.3 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

2 buttons have no accessible name, so screen readers announce just “button”.

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

Landmarks should have a unique role or role/label/title (i.e. accessible name) combination: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

13 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: 7 elements on the page fail this check, rated minor by axe-core.

Elements with visible text labels do not have matching accessible names. (11 elements).

Your title is 69 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “Boston News, Weather and Sports - Massachusetts News - WCVB Channel 5”.

1 link use generic text like “click here” or “learn more”, which tells Google nothing about the page behind it.

The homepage links to 124 pages on wcvb.com and 35 external pages.

Your robots.txt shuts out ChatGPT (ChatGPT-User) and Perplexity (PerplexityBot). 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 https://www.wcvb.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.

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.

https://www.wcvb.com/nowcast, https://www.wcvb.com/subscribe and https://www.wcvb.com/traffic have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

Your homepage links to 3 pages by a URL that isn't their canonical one, for example https://www.wcvb.com/memorials, whose canonical is https://www.wcvb.com/article/chptr/65059124. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

https://www.wcvb.com/memorials, https://www.wcvb.com/privacy-notice and https://www.wcvb.com/terms-of-use have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

https://www.wcvb.com/memorials 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 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 87 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

12 of 37 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

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

The page uses 1 deprecated browser API that will stop working in future browsers (“The Topics API is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.”).

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

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

No testimonials, customer logos, ratings or customer counts on the homepage: nothing tells a new visitor that others already trust you.

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 1,119 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Amazon Ads, Comscore, Google Ads, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager and 1 more (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (Ketch) is installed; check it blocks these until visitors agree where the law requires it.

Opening the homepage sets 26 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 70 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.