Performance and Accessibility Audit of the Beto O’Rourke 2020 Campaign Website

This is one in a series of posts that will look at the performance and #a11y metrics of the websites for the currently declared 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. Yeah, all of them! For more background on what I’m doing and how I’m doing it check read this.

Home page of betorourke.com

betoorourke.com

Google Lighthouse

Lighthouse scores for betoorourke.com

Performance: 72 out of 100

Not too bad, mostly the usual suspects of render blocking CSS and javascript in the head of the document that are slowing down the First Meaningful Paint to 3.7 seconds.

Accessibility: 72 out of 100

  • Three low contrast warnings in a site who’s color scheme is black and white! The footer text uses color: gray which doesn’t pass the WCAG AA level of compliance. The hex code for gray is #808080, subtilely darkening to even just #707070 would fix this issue.
  • I think there are more egregious contrast problems deeper in the site, but I’m limiting this review to the homepage.

Best Practices: 86 out of 100

There is one document.write() used, which could be delaying the initial rendering of the page. These are often used by third-party tracking scripts that get added to site.

SEO: 100 out of 100

No problems detected.

Network

  • HTTPS: yes
  • 57 Requests
  • 1.6 MB resources
  • Largest asset is a 319 KB jpg of Beto that acts as the page background. This image randomly changes on page load so your results may vary.

Platform

  • WordPress, custom theme

Notes

Overall a relatively small homepage that loads pretty fast. To be expected when the only purpose is a signup form and to display navigation to the rest of the site for more information. The black and white design lends itself well to good performance, with few extra images or lines of CSS needed. It’s just that, it’s so… boring!