wikihow.com website review

31 images could be 1.3 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 350 ms faster on a phone.

The page has 1,517 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

About 154 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page.

1 file blocks the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining it could save about 150 ms.

3 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 119 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

2 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics), adding 191 KiB and 94 ms of main-thread time.

About 52 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

2 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (16 KiB).

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.

The page becomes fully interactive after 11.7 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

9 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' tap response (inp) went from 203 ms to 192 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 1.4 s to 1.4 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 2.9 MB in 88 requests on a phone: images 2.4 MB (70), scripts 411 KiB (8) and HTML 79 KiB (1). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

5 images (504 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.

4 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example shawn_achor_logo.png at 524 px wide, shown at 121 px. Resized copies would save about 297 KiB.

5 images further down the page (504 KiB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.83 g of CO₂e: 99.2 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Input buttons must have discernible text: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated critical by axe-core.

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

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

ARIA commands must have an accessible name: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated serious by axe-core.

1 element has a tabindex above 0, which scrambles the keyboard order.

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

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 12 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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.

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

6 form fields have no label, so screen readers announce an empty box and autofill guesses.

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

Your meta description is 164 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

No Open Graph image (also missing: og:title, og:description), so links shared on LinkedIn, Slack or Facebook show no preview picture.

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

1 link has no real href, so search engines can't follow it.

The homepage links to 245 pages on wikihow.com and 24 external pages.

Your robots.txt shuts out ChatGPT search (OAI-SearchBot), ChatGPT (ChatGPT-User), Claude search (Claude-SearchBot), Claude (Claude-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.wikihow.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, 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.wikihow.com/Special:RequestTopic and https://www.wikihow.com/Special:CommunityDashboard are marked noindex but linked from your homepage. If they are meant to be found, remove the noindex.

https://www.wikihow.com/Pro and https://www.wikihow.com/Tech-Help-Pro all use the title “Client Challenge”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

https://www.wikihow.com/Pro, https://www.wikihow.com/Guides, https://www.wikihow.com/Tech-Help-Pro, https://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Videos-wikiHowPro, https://www.wikihow.com/Special:RequestTopic and https://www.wikihow.com/Special:CommunityDashboard have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

Your homepage links to 1 page by a URL that isn't its canonical one, for example https://www.wikihow.com/Special:Randomizer, whose canonical is https://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Landscape-Quilt. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

https://www.wikihow.com/Pro and https://www.wikihow.com/Tech-Help-Pro have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

https://www.wikihow.com/Pro and https://www.wikihow.com/Tech-Help-Pro have 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 173 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

Large scripts ship without source maps.

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.

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 1,597 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 9 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 2 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.