GamCare: technical audit and re-audit
Homepage server response time fell 73%, from 1,065ms to 290ms, between the July 2025 audit and the April 2026 re-audit.
A technical audit of gamcare.org.uk in 2025, measured again in April 2026
Project highlights
GamCare provides free information, advice and support in the UK for anyone affected by gambling harm. Its site combines support journeys, a forum, a treatment finder and a large library of advice pages.
The problem
Our May to June 2025 audit crawled 26,453 URLs and found about 10,453 orphan pages, 39.5% of the site.
The baseline crawl on 8 July 2025 measured a homepage server response time (TTFB) of 1,065ms, a poor TTFB on 99% of pages and render blocking resources on every page. It also counted 22 redirect chains and 2,927 accessibility violations, 4.3 per page.
What we did
Totally.Digital ran the audit with Screaming Frog, PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, WebPageTest and Chrome DevTools.
Each issue was scored on traffic impact, conversion impact and cost to fix, then grouped into five workstreams: orphan content, redirect chains, accessibility, page speed and on page targeting.
GamCare’s in house team made the changes from tickets we wrote for its developers, each with a named owner, an expected outcome and a way to check the fix.
On 13 April 2026 we crawled the site again and compared it with the July 2025 baseline.
What changed
Between 8 July 2025 and 13 April 2026, measured in our own crawls:
Homepage server response time fell from 1,065ms to 290ms, down 73%. Pages with a poor TTFB (over 600ms) fell from 99% to 24%. Both crawls used the same lab method for TTFB.
Render blocking resources fell from 100% of pages to 10%. Indexable URLs rose from 69.8% to 80.3%, and redirect chains fell from 22 to 2.
Accessibility violations fell from 2,927 to 971, down 67%, and from 4.3 to 1.4 per page. The homepage scores 99/100 for Lighthouse accessibility.
Two things did not improve: browser caching headers were still missing on 99% of pages, and pages with headings out of sequence rose from 159 to 241.
Now
The 2026 work covers on page targeting: searches where the wrong page ranks, pages that compete with each other, and topics with no dedicated page. At the April 2026 review, forum hub pages linking the main site to its most active forum threads had not yet been built.
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Related projects
National Garden Scheme and the University of Greenwich: two more sites where we set out the fixes and measured the results.
