Performance and Accessibility Review of the Wayne Messam for America 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 wayneforusa.com

wayneforusa.com

Google Lighthouse

Lighthouse scores for wayneforusa.com

Performance: 57 out of 100

There are a bunch of render blocking CSS files in the head of the document, but they are minified and cached, so that’s a performance win.

There isn’t much interaction or scripting being executed so the Time to Interactive is 6+ seconds. Not great by any means but compared to the competition it’s quite lean.

Accessibility: 82 out of 100

  • Default :focus outlines on interactive elements.
  • Low contrast issues with text.
  • Social links don’t have any link text. Over and over I’ve seen this and it is such an easy fix.

Best Practices: 57 out of 100

24 requests are not served via HTTP/2.

Scrolling event listeners are not passive.

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

SEO: 83 out of 100

His homepage wasn’t in the top 3 pages of results for my first “Wayne Messam” Google search so I wasn’t expecting great things here. Maybe I’m the first website to link back to him? At least waynemessam.com redirected appropriately.

The Google Tag Manager script is 404’d, that’s probably not a good sign.

Network

  • HTTPS: yes
  • 33 Requests
  • 2.3 MB resources
  • Largest asset is a 184 KB icon font. Yet I count only 6 icons in use across the entire site. This is a significant waste of space and the font could be subset or dropped in favor of a few svg files.

Platform

Notes

The site is so basic and yet performs so poorly across all categories. There is a contact form in the footer that is fixed in place and revealed on scroll, yet no consideration was given to reserve enough space so that elements weren’t cut off.

Contact form bug