Weekly website woes ep1 – nrl.com

Each week we feature one international website, whether overall good or bad, and pick 3 things they could improve about the site (in no particular order). With the NRL kicking off this week, our featured site is the very nice official NRL website. While overall it’s a good looking site and fairly easy to use, there is still room for improvement. Here goes our 3 suggested improvements (based on the site as it was on 2 March 2025 at 3pm GMT+13).

The site overall is very busy. While it could be cleaner, with more spacing, this site has a lot of content to fit in. Therefore, a busy site is fine, if pulled off well. While it generally is, there’s some fairly inconsistent spacing. For example, a lot of the homepage’s sections only have around 37 pixels between them. E.g:

Whereas some, like the below example, have a massive 318px gap. To be fair, slight caveat on these ones. I can see in the DOM there’s a Google Ad that’s supposed to show here. However, it’s not showing on most page loads for me, so that’s still a gap from a user perspective.

There are then other sections with around 115px spacing. While a variety in spacing can be a design feature, there’s just not enough consistency here.

While the site has a lot going on, which is going to be a challenge for speed – it still should be ranking better on GTmetrix or Google Page speed. There is likely some code restructuring, removal of reliance on third party scripts and further caching/CDN tweaking that is required to improve this.

When viewing websites in most browsers on a Windows machine, you can hit F12 and view a whole lot of information (dev tools) about the website. One of the handy things you can see with dev tools is a console of site errors.

For nrl.com this reveals a few errors. They all seem to stem from third party scripts, but still really should be tidied up.

As a side note – doing this on iOS is a bit more complicated, you’ll need to do some research if you would like to do that.

That’s all we are going to cover today. We noted a number of other issues, including a potential security concern. However, we’ll cover those in a future episode.