wsls.com website review

About 1.7 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 8.1 s faster on a phone.

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

A phone's processor spends 16.0 s on main-thread work while loading, 8.5 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

3 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 1.6 s.

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 3,030 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Google/Doubleclick Ads and Osano CMP and others), adding 2.4 MB and 2.4 s of main-thread time.

9 images could be 946 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

20 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 604 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 528 ms of main-thread work and 504 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 425 ms of main-thread work and 598 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.

Osano CMP costs a phone 401 ms of main-thread work and 102 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.

atmtd.com costs a phone 335 ms of main-thread work and 565 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 178 ms of main-thread work and 430 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.

Polyfills for old browsers add 26 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 250 ms faster on a phone.

About 39 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.

5 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

3 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

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 33.3 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 21.7 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 49.9 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 2.2 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

The first text or image appears after 3.1 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 2.6 s for the largest content to appear (75th percentile). Good is under 2.5 s.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 169 ms to 213 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 2.0 s to 2.5 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

The layout shifts by 0.113 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

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

Your homepage downloads 10.4 MB in 1,027 requests on a phone: other files 4.8 MB (607), scripts 3.5 MB (80) and images 1.3 MB (232). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 2.95 g of CO₂e: 353.5 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Links must have discernible text: 37 elements on the page fail this check, rated serious by axe-core.

28 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: 17 elements on the page fail this check, rated serious by axe-core.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 2 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 and h3 → h5), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

Your title is 69 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “WSLS 10 News | Roanoke, Virginia News, Local Headlines | WSLS News 10”.

Your meta description is 222 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

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

The homepage links to 267 pages on wsls.com and 8 external pages.

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

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 91 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 image failed to load on a phone, for example https://www.wsls.com/static-resources/shared/images/gd_dark.svg.

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

22 of 55 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

5 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 503 ()”.

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

Large scripts ship without source maps.

Social proof on the homepage: 5 trust badges. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

No analytics or tag manager detected in the HTML, so you can't measure whether any of these fixes work.

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 4,605 words of visible text.

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

Opening the homepage sets 27 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 83 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.