wsetglobal.com website review

12 images could be 4.6 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 68 (desktop: 71). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

About 79 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 450 ms faster on a phone.

About 349 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page.

Adobe TypeKit costs a phone 2 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.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (ShareThis, Google Tag Manager and Cookiebot and others), adding 785 KiB and 326 ms of main-thread time.

49 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (140 KiB).

38 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

Polyfills for old browsers add 15 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

2 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 150 ms.

4 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 78 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

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.

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

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

Your largest element takes 22.3 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “WSET is the world's leading provider of drinks education.”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 26.6 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 6.6 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Real visitors wait 2.9 s for the largest content to appear (75th percentile). Good is under 2.5 s.

Real visitors see the first content after 2.0 s (75th percentile). Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 1.2 s for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 77 ms to 92 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.3 s to 2.2 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 8.7 MB in 129 requests on a phone: images 7.6 MB (70), scripts 754 KiB (16) and fonts 309 KiB (9). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

2 images weigh 4.3 MB together. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

2 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example graduation-2026-header.png at 1,608 px wide, shown at 310 px. Resized copies would save about 2.9 MB.

4 images (4.4 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.

3 images further down the page (4.4 MB) 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 2.47 g of CO₂e: 296.3 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”.

ARIA input fields must have an accessible name: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated serious by axe-core.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 9 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.

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

Your title is only 11 characters: “WSET | WSET”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

No structured data (JSON-LD), so Google can't show rich results such as your logo, ratings or FAQs.

No XML sitemap at https://wsetglobal.com/sitemap.xml, so Google discovers your pages only by following links.

The homepage links to 94 pages on wsetglobal.com and 14 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://wsetglobal.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://wsetglobal.com/qualifications/wset-level-1-award-in-spirits and https://wsetglobal.com/qualifications/wset-level-2-award-in-spirits all use the title “Spirits education - distilling courses | WSET”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

Your homepage links to 4 pages by a URL that isn't their canonical one, for example https://wsetglobal.com/qualifications, whose canonical is https://wsetglobal.com/Find%20wine%20classes%20and%20drinks%20courses. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 56 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

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

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

3 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Access to XMLHttpRequest at 'https://data.stbuttons.click/data' from origin 'https://wsetglobal.com' has been blocked b…”.

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

Large scripts ship without source maps.

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

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.

A local customer looking to call finds no phone number on the homepage. Add one, ideally as a tap-to-call link.

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

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

There is no link to Google or Apple Maps. A directions link is one tap for a phone visitor.

The homepage carries about 368 words of visible text.

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

Opening the homepage sets 5 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 19 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.