DEV Community

donoberry
donoberry

Posted on

GirlsGoneGolfing... isn't as bad as I thought.

Alt Text
GirlsGoneGolfing is a female golf clothing apparel brand created by my grandmother in her post retirement life. She has a website girlsgonegolfing.com. It doesn't look like it has been updated in a while, but the copyright is up to date. I am not sure if she still even sells anything, or if the company was ever profitable. She used to go to golf shows around the northeast.
Anyway, enough about a probably dead company you don't care about. Lets see how the audits were.
Alt Text
Alt Text
If we can all keep a secret here, I figure my grandma's website would be dogshit, all due respect. Nothing personal, I just assumed the website wouldn't be the best. The performance score of 92 was very high. All the other categories were in the yellow, so some room to improve. The biggest change the performance section had was to preload key requests. Believe it or not, I did't know what that meant, so upon some review this can be done by using <link rel=preload>. This basically goes ahead of the loading process and starts to load things that are requested later in the page. This will make the page load faster. The loading process is basically working ahead of the page. I don't think anyone goes to the page, so it doesn't really matter how fast it loads.

Eliminating render blocking services would also increase the page loading speed. Alt Text All of these URLs are blocking the first paint of the webpage.

I am on a fast internet connection, but for those on a slow connection, the loading speed would drastically increase because external scripts are injected using document.write(). Document.write is blocked on Chrome.

In the accessibility section (score of 82), there are not any headings, skip links, or landmark regions. Attention users without a mouse trying to use this website: sorry. It's gonna be a bitch. Screen readers will have to move through every link. The HTML element also does not have a [lang] attribute. The language of the website is not declared, so screen readers might not read the website correctly. The links do not have a discernible name. Again, sorry if you are using a screen reader. I went through the source code, and it looks like the only links that don't have names are the links at the top of the page to: home, products, about us, etc.

Best practices (score of 64). Ok grandma, this website doesn't even use https, what are we doing. HTTPS is secure, and if golf apparel transactions are happening on this website, I wouldn't feel safe entering my credit card info on a http website. Thankfully, I don't show for female golf apparel. There was a problem of the imagines loading in a one size fits all style. The exact problem was "serve responsive images". Pictures should be resized based on what screen size they are going to. There should be different imagine sizes depending on who is requesting the website. The website lacks the HTML doctype <!DOCTYPE html>. I am not sure how, I thought this was always the first thing to put in HTML code.

The SEO (score of 77) had problems that left it not very mobile friendly. I checked on my phone, and the website isn't optimized at all for mobile use. The desktop version loads on my iPhone (yes I am slave to Apple). No <meta name="viewport"> tag with width or initial-scale was found. Search engines will rank websites based on how mobile friendly they are. Without that tag, the website gives you the desktop view even if you aren't on a desk top. I'd imagine search engines have girlsGoneGolfing last on their rankings, kind of like Dasani when you rank best water brands. There also was a flag that font sizes are too small on mobile devices, which is true, you have to pinch and zoom to read. Places to tap, like buttons and links, are also too small. All of these problems would be fixed if the viewport tag was there, so the page could be optimized for mobile viewing. There is no way around it girlsgonegolfing.com is an enemy of mobile users, not a friend.

So overall, a good website if you go back to before the smartphones took over. The website looks like it belongs in the prehistoric, presmartphone era, probably because that was the last time it was maintained. It lacks HTTPS (sheesh) and doesn't give the slightest shit if you are a mobile user. Pinch and zoom, peasant.

Also if you want to buy some apparel, there is still a bunch of it in the spare bedroom at my grandma's house. Please inquire if interested. (paid advertisement)

YouTube link to a video of me talking about this is here

Top comments (0)