Performance and Accessibility Review of the Mike Gravel 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 for mikegravel.org

mikegravel.org

Really, no one can be sure Mike Gravel isn’t a made up fiction. That he isn’t just two teens in a trench coat, or a Corgi wearing sunglasses. I refuse to seriously consider that he’s an 89 year old anti-war former (as in 1981) US Senator running for president.

Google Lighthouse

Lighthouse scores for mikegravel.org

Performance: 86 out of 100

Deploy this as a static site and you’d score 100s across all categories. The same performance hits that impact the other twenty. two. candidates I’ve reviewed so far impact this WordPress landing page.

There is either no or very short cache lifetimes on all the assets. Setting these to longer durations would improve the performance metrics for subsequent visits to the site. Of which there might be dozens!

Accessibility: 66 out of 100

  • Interactive elements don’t have any visible :focus styling.
  • Form inputs have no associated labels.
  • <html> element must have a lang attribute
  • User scaling is disabled. Think of the 89 year old’s eyes! Or mine!

Best Practices: 86 out of 100

The links to cross-origin destinations are unsafe. Witnessed this in every single site reviewed.

SEO: 100 out of 100

No outstanding issues.

Network

  • HTTPS: yes
  • 48 Requests
  • 3.9 MB resources
  • Largest assets are related to the youtube player embed, 375 KB javascript. No big issue with this since it is efficiently served from Google’s content delivery network.

Platform

  • WordPress, custom theme.

Notes

Nah. I’m still not convince this isn’t a prank by the web designers with their “combined 25 years of experience.”