wral.com website review

About 3.2 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 9.1 s faster on a phone.

213 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (3.3 MB).

7 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 1.9 s.

confiant-integrations.net costs a phone 1.2 s of main-thread work and 1.3 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.

A phone's processor spends 13.6 s on main-thread work while loading, 7.5 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

Your mobile performance score is 28. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

The page has 3,672 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (confiant-integrations.net, Taboola and ops.co and others), adding 5.1 MB and 3.8 s of main-thread time.

17 images could be 758 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 550 ms faster on a phone.

Taboola costs a phone 557 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 469 ms of main-thread work and 1.3 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.

ops.co costs a phone 536 ms of main-thread work and 563 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 481 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Polyfills for old browsers add 96 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

Rubicon Project costs a phone 360 ms of main-thread work and 113 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.

About 54 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

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.

3 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

2 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

The first text or image appears after 10.0 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 26.0 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the element shown below.

Visually, the page fills in at 15.7 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 74.1 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 1.7 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 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 138 ms to 144 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 10.2 MB in 1,344 requests on a phone: scripts 6.3 MB (132), media 1.3 MB (4) and images 1.2 MB (443). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

1 image is downloaded at several times the size a phone draws it, for example thumbnail at 1,248 px wide, shown at 116 px. Resized copies would save about 52 KiB.

1 image (56 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 2.90 g of CO₂e: 348.5 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

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

Elements must only use permitted ARIA attributes: 8 elements on the page fail this check, rated serious by axe-core.

<html> element must have a lang attribute: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated serious by axe-core.

Scrollable region must have keyboard access: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated serious by axe-core.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 3 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Contentinfo landmark should not be contained in another landmark: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Document should not have more than one contentinfo landmark: 1 element on the page fails 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.

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

The <html> element has no lang attribute, so screen readers may read the page in the wrong voice and accent.

ARIA role should be appropriate for the element: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated minor by axe-core.

Headings skip levels (h2 → h4 and h2 → h4), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

2 links have no real href, so search engines can't follow them.

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

The homepage links to 170 pages on wral.com and 6 external pages.

Your robots.txt lets ChatGPT search (OAI-SearchBot), ChatGPT (ChatGPT-User), Claude search (Claude-SearchBot), Claude (Claude-User), Perplexity (PerplexityBot) and Perplexity (Perplexity-User) read the homepage but closes other sections to them, so answers about those pages can't cite you.

There is no https://www.wral.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, which the crawlers above handle.

https://www.wral.com/news/local/photos-nc-storm-damage-tornado-warnings-october-2026, https://www.wral.com/video/wral-news-plus/20364185, https://www.wral.com/video/forecast-raleigh-durham-fayetteville and https://www.wral.com/news/local/mobile-home-destroyed-fire-sampson-county-october-2026 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 149 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 image failed to load on a phone, for example https://ams-pageview-public.s3.amazonaws.com/1x1-pixel.png?id=ae4b63f97dd4.

27 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.”).

6 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “window._init_marketwatch is not a function”.

1 image is displayed at the wrong aspect ratio, so it looks stretched or squashed.

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

Requests the notification permission on page load.

Large scripts ship without source maps.

On a phone, there is no call to action on the first screen: visitors have to scroll to find out what to do next.

Social proof on the homepage: 1 trust badge. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

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 1,889 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Amazon Ads, Criteo, Google Ads, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager and 3 mores (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (OneTrust) is installed; check it blocks these until visitors agree where the law requires it.

Opening the homepage sets 23 cookies, 1 of them by other companies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 92 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.