Two Narwhals – Site review

Two Narwhals is a site dedicated to the sharing of creative links, sites and resources. The site is owned and operated by [Login to see the link] and can be found here: [Login to see the link]

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Design

Whilst not everyone’s cup of tea, I find the retro/old-school styling of the site to be really creative, and fun. This reflects the sites creative niche and works well. The site uses a soft pastel colour palette and is easy to follow and understand.
I love the two narwhals logo, as this is both simplistic and effective.

Personally however, I’d like to see an option in the header to switch to a dark mode should the user wish to do so.

Content

Whilst the site doesn’t have much unique content itself (Afterall, it’s a curated list of links to other sites and resources!) the provided links are high quality (Hey, Creators Wave is on there…! 😉) and well organised, with the ability for users to rank the listings.
There is then the ability to sort these listings:

Functionality

I really like the functionality of the site. The site is simple at core, and this makes it very easy for a complete novice to come along and understand the site and its navigation and functionality.
My main grudge here, is I would love to see the option for a webmaster to “claim” a link – for example, we should be able to claim the Creators Wave listing : [Login to see the link] so that I can add more details, a social link, and perhaps even updates over time.

I like the ability to report a “nugget” (a shared resource) if this is in breach of any copyrights, or contains incorrect or broken information / links.

Speed

All sites are tested from London, UK using a Chrome user-agent. Testing conducted using [Login to see the link] where possible. Where this is not possible, a notice is displayed on the review.

The site is noticeably quick and responsive. I ran the site through webpagetest and got the below results:

The main issue here was the Time to first byte (TTFB) which scored 737ms.
737 ms First Byte Time
343 ms Target First Byte Time

If this was to be reduced then the sites initial load would be lightning quick and this would have a positive impact on the overall site SEO as well as the user experience.

The site makes good use of compression and caching:
Use persistent connections (keep alive): 100/100
Use gzip compression for transferring compressable responses: 100/100
824.4 KB total in compressible text, target size = 824.4 KB - potential savings = 0.0 KB

Compress Images: 100/100
86.7 KB total in images, target size = 86.7 KB - potential savings = 0.0 KB

There are a couple of assets that could do with caching if possible:
Leverage browser caching of static assets: 94/100

FAILED - (5.0 minutes) - [Login to see the link]
FAILED - (5.0 minutes) - [Login to see the link]
FAILED - (5.0 minutes) - [Login to see the link]
FAILED - (15.0 minutes) - [Login to see the link]
FAILED - (15.0 minutes) - [Login to see the link]
WARNING - (1.1 hours) - [Login to see the link]
WARNING - (24.0 hours) - [Login to see the link]

Use a CDN for all static assets: 98/100

FAILED - [Login to see the link]
FAILED - [Login to see the link]

CDN's Used:

www.twonarwhals.com : Cloudflare
fonts.googleapis.com : Google
cdn.jsdelivr.net : jsDelivr
fonts.gstatic.com : Google
www.google.com : Google
www.google-analytics.com : Google
secure.gravatar.com : Automattic
www.gstatic.com : Google

Security

There are a number of potential security issues that were highlighted during our testing:

Lack of HSTS (Strict transport security)
Lack of X-Content-Type
Lack of X-Fame header
Lack of X XSS Protection, A Cross-site scripting filter.
We also found a reported vulnerability, due to outdated libraries used by the site – and we will reach out to [Login to see the link] to responsibly disclose this separately.

Mobile

What sort of site can exist without a mobile-ready theme in todays modern era of web?
I am pleased to report that TwoNarwhals has a responsive theme that works well on mobile:

My only complaint here, and this is me being very nit-picky, is I’d like to see less content in the text of the cookie notice, as I feel that this subtracts from the content of the site when browsed on a mobile.

Other

It is nice to see that Two Narwhals takes data seriously, and their inclusion of a cookie selection menu only echoes this. The ability to choose the cookies that matter to you, or simply select the essentials only makes this site a strong privacy advocate.

Overall a fantastic site, but I’d like to see more functionality added:

The ability to claim a nugget.
The ability to edit a nugget to add further details, etc.
Dark mode functionality.
The ability to submit a nugget – Unless you needed to be logged in, I could not find this function?