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.
Google Lighthouse
Performance: 19 out of 100
The biggest impact on this score is the javascript running on the browser’s main thread, 16.7 seconds spent parsing and executing these scripts. This brings the Time to Interactive to a ghastly 18 seconds.
The loading of large offscreen images should be deferred until they would be in view.
Accessibility: 57 out of 100
- Buttons without a text label, only an inaccessible icon.
- [aria-*] attributes don’t have valid values.
- Inputs without labels, only placeholders.
- Links without discernible names.
- Visual way-finding via tabbing is mostly fine.
Best Practices: 64 out of 100
Scrolling event listeners are not passive.
Vulnerabilities detected in jQuery and LoDash libraries used. (maybe don’t load the whole library!)
A crap ton of links to new window that don’t use rel=”noopener”. Many of these come from the Twitter embeds on the page, another performance bottleneck.
Network errors are being logged to the console. This is the browser just screaming “Hey, fix this thing!”
SEO: 99 out of 100
The tap targets in the aforementioned embedded tweets are too small.
Network
- HTTPS: yes
- 92 Requests
- 13 MB resources
- Largest asset is a 8 MB video.
Platform
- WordPress, Scotchpress theme yet again.
Notes
At this point in all the reviews I’ve noticed the trends that a) the Scotchpress theme has some serious issues, and b) the actionkit.js and actiontag.js libraries are the biggest performance hogs.
I understand that these off the shelf toolkits help spin up a new candidate quickly and get the crucial fundraising step started, but from this web developer’s perspective they would greatly benefit from their developers showing any interest in performance and accessibility, or their clients demanding it.