Performance and Accessibility Review of the John Delaney 2020 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.

Homepage of johndelaney.com

johndelaney.com

Google Lighthouse

Lighthouse scores for johndelaney.com

Performance: 31 out of 100

17.4 seconds Time to interactive, there are a lot of large images offscreen where loading could be deferred.

The main javascript bundle is over 1 MB. I’ve built fully reactive front-ends built on top of the WordPress API at half that download budget, so I can’t imagine what they are doing here.

Accessibility: 61 out of 100

  • Contrast issues
  • Links that use only images without any alt text present (boooooo!)

Best Practices: 79 out of 100

The usual suspects of target=”_blank” links not having a rel=”noopener” attribute present. This is a persistent issue with the ActBlue donation forms present on almost every candidate website so far.

SEO: 92 out of 100

Quite a few links that have duplicate “Learn More” text.

Network

  • HTTPS: yes
  • 63 Requests
  • 8.2 MB resources
  • Largest asset is the 1.1 MB main.min.js bundle

Platform

  • WordPress, custom theme.

Notes

I appreciate the GO JOHN GO ASCII art hidden in the source code, along with a website contact email address.

Update 6-2-2019

Seems there is one pro-Delaney bot out there responding to any and all mentions of John Delaney with support. Good luck with that.