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.

billdeblasio.com

Google Lighthouse

Performance: ? out of 100

Unfortunately, a fresh page load of the homepage here redirects to an offsite ActBlue donation page. It’s therefore impossible to measure the performance in the same way I’ve done for all the other candidates to date.

I’ll have to throw this out and measure the other scores based on a re-run of the test.

Accessibility: 84 out of 100

• There is a skip to content link present, but it’s broken! The id it is supposed to link to isn’t present anywhere on the page.
• Color contrast issues. If background images are not present, links and text are white on a white background.
• User is unable to scale.

Best Practices: 93 out of 100

The homepage hero is twice the displayed resolution. A <picture> element to serve correctly sized images would be preferable here.

SEO: 100 out of 100

No issues found.

Network

• HTTPS: yes
• 28 Requests
• 1.4 MB resources
• Largest asset is a 604 KB homepage hero jpg.

Platform

• WordPress, a “wp-frns-pac” theme, custom build I believe.

Notes

The redirection on the homepage is both super annoying and problematic for these comparisons. As a visitor this is worse to me than embedding the form directly on the homepage or placing in a popup.

I can’t help but critique the design in parts. The use of color is all over the place. Green and blue logo. Yellow text and buttons. A red favicon. It all seems hastily put together, and as a result there really isn’t much going on in the code to critique or review.

The yellow text over hero image is especially hard to read and these icons straight up suck.

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.

ericswalwell.com

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.

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.

michaelbennet.com

Google Lighthouse

Performance: 83 out of 100

A 4.4 seconds Time to Interactive score places this performance score in some of the highest of all candidates. The theme is yet another Scotchpress variation which show that same code bases can have wildly different scores that depend heavily on the media assets chosen.

There are images present that should be efficiently encoded to remove meta data. Doing this for all the images on the page would save hundreds of kilobytes.

Accessibility: 57 out of 100

• IDs used are not unique. Many of these are in SVGs that should be optimized.
• User scaling is disallowed.
• Links without discernible names.
• Form inputs without labels.
• Visual way-finding via tabbing is mostly fine.

Best Practices: 79 out of 100

This has been present in other sites but I haven’t called it out until now. So how many users are still using Internet Explorer 6 on your site, Michael? Do you really need these lines anymore:

<!--[if lt IE 7 ]>
<html itemscope 
      itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization" 
      id="ie6" 
      class="ie ie-old" 
      lang="en-US">
<![endif]-->

Spoiler! You don’t!

SEO: 100 out of 100

No issues.

Network

• HTTPS: yes
• 39 Requests
• 2.7 MB resources
• Largest asset is a 752 KB jpg family image. This is probably twice the necessary dimensions it is typically displayed at.

Platform

• WordPress, Scothpress (paid) theme. Interestingly enough, this is the same theme as Amy Klobuchar used.

Notes

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.

stevebullock.com

Google Lighthouse

Performance: 65 out of 100

Yawn. Plenty of images that would be better served with other formats and optimizations.

Accessibility: 57 out of 100

• IDs used are not unique. Many of these are in SVGs that should be optimized.
• User scaling is disallowed.
• Links without text.

Best Practices: 71 out of 100

This has been present in other sites but I haven’t called it out until now. So how many users are still using Internet Explorer 6 on your site, Steve? Do you really need these lines anymore:

<!--[if lt IE 7 ]>
<html itemscope 
      itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization" 
      id="ie6" 
      class="ie ie-old" 
      lang="en-US">
<![endif]-->

Spoiler! You don’t!

SEO: 100 out of 100

No issues.

Network

• HTTPS: yes
• 32 Requests
• 3.1 MB resources
• Largest asset is a 747 KB jpg image used in the footer.

Platform

• WordPress, Scothpress (paid) theme. Interestingly enough, this is the same theme as Amy Klobuchar used.

Notes

One of the only candidates to have a link to his Snapchat account.

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.

timryanforamerica.com

Google Lighthouse

Performance: 22 out of 100

YIKES! 5.2 seconds until the first meaningful paint of content.

There are very heavy images that haven’t been properly optimized and FIVE videos being loaded on the page at one time.

Hundreds of KB in unused CSS and javascript are present on the page, spread across multiple files that block rendering until they’ve been fully downloaded and parsed.

Modernizr classes are present for every test ever, including borderradius. Scoff! Seriously, make your own bundle for only the tests you need! I can’t remember the last year I had to prefix my border-radius CSS.

Accessibility: 55 out of 100

• Color contrast issues.
• Social links using only an icon and no discernible text.
• Images with alt attributes.
• User scaling is disallowed.

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.

jQuery and jQuery UI version vulnerabilities are present. Someone is still using jQuery UI?!

SEO: 100 out of 100

No glaring issues.

Network

• HTTPS: yes
• 191 Requests
• 20.3 MB resources
• Largest asset is the 9.8 MB TimRyan_WebsiteSplash_FineCut_01_LOOP_20180705-1.mp4 used in the background of the home page. The fact that these files are being served from a dev subdomain is probably not helping matters.

Platform

• WordPress, Bridge theme.

Notes

The chosen theme relies heavily on plugins for much of its functionality, bloating the overall experience.