Largest Contentful Paint
Good: < 2.5s
Measures how long it takes for the main content to appear on screen
How to optimize spacex.com
Missing preconnections to content.spacex.com and sxcontent9668.azureedge.us add 730ms of network delay to critical resources.
Add <link rel="preconnect" href="https://content.spacex.com"> and <link rel="preconnect" href="https://sxcontent9668.azureedge.us"> to your HTML head. This allows the browser to establish connections early, reducing the 4.3-second LCP by up to 730ms.
A score of 83 falls in the "Needs Improvement" range (50-89). While it is better than poor (0-49), you should aim for 90+ to provide an optimal user experience and maximize SEO benefits.
This site is slower than approximately 35% of similar sites. The main issues affecting performance are image optimization, JavaScript execution time, and layout stability.
Addressing these issues could improve your conversion rate by 15-20% and boost your search engine rankings.
Largest Contentful Paint
Good: < 2.5s
Measures how long it takes for the main content to appear on screen
Interaction to Next Paint
Good: < 200ms
Measures how quickly the page responds to user interactions
Cumulative Layout Shift
Good: < 0.1
Measures visual stability - how much content shifts during page load
This SpaceX website has good but not great performance with a score of 83/100. The biggest problem is enormous video files (over 15MB total) that are severely slowing down page load times, causing the Largest Contentful Paint to take 4.3 seconds - much longer than the recommended 2.5 seconds. The site would benefit significantly from compressing these large video files, implementing better caching strategies (currently only 12 hours), and optimizing oversized images that are being served at much higher resolutions than needed. These improvements could easily push the performance score into the 90s and provide a much faster user experience.
Why It Matters:
Large video files (13.8MB) have inadequate caching (12 hours vs. recommended 1 year) causing repeated downloads and delaying LCP by 1.4 seconds.
How to Fix:
Configure your CDN to set cache headers for video files to 1 year (31536000 seconds). Implement video compression to reduce file sizes by 50-70%. Consider using adaptive bitrate streaming for mobile devices to serve appropriately sized video content.
Why It Matters:
96KB of unused JavaScript in vendor bundle delays both FCP and LCP by 450ms while legacy polyfills add unnecessary bloat.
How to Fix:
Use webpack-bundle-analyzer to identify unused code in your vendor bundle and implement tree-shaking. Remove Object.create and Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor polyfills as they're supported in all modern browsers. Consider code splitting to defer non-critical JavaScript execution.
Once your site is optimized, maintain that speed. Use DeployHQ for zero-downtime, automated deployments—so performance fixes and updates go live safely every time, without breaking your site.
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More Generic Speed Tests
The LCP image is not discoverable in initial HTML, causing delayed loading and poor performance.
280 KiB of unused JavaScript wastes bandwidth and delays LCP by 1.5 seconds.
Render-blocking scripts delay First Contentful Paint by 11.2 seconds, severely impacting user experience.
JavaScript is causing 278ms of forced reflows that block rendering and hurt user experience.