aur.edu website review

33 images could be 14.2 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 4.3 s faster on a phone.

About 1.1 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.4 s faster on a phone.

35 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 3.4 s.

36 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (1.4 MB).

8 third-party services load with your homepage (YouTube, Google Tag Manager and TikTok and others), adding 2.0 MB and 981 ms of main-thread time.

Your mobile performance score is 54. Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

About 179 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 600 ms faster on a phone.

YouTube costs a phone 344 ms of main-thread work and 980 KiB of downloads while your page loads. Loading it after the page is usable, or only on the pages that need it, takes that off the critical path.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 300 ms of main-thread work and 377 KiB of downloads while your page loads. Loading it after the page is usable, or only on the pages that need it, takes that off the critical path.

A phone's processor spends 2.6 s on main-thread work while loading, 1.4 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

The page has 2,356 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

12 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 208 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

135 KiB JavaScript is shipped twice across bundles.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 50 ms).

Polyfills for old browsers add 38 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

35 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

13 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

Critical files load one after another instead of in parallel (3 chains). Preconnecting to key origins and preloading the hero image shortens the chain.

Scripts make the browser recalculate the layout repeatedly while the page loads, which wastes processor time on phones.

Real Chrome users on phones do not pass Google's Core Web Vitals on this page (28-day field data from the Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab)). Google uses this in ranking.

Real visitors see the first content after 3.1 s (75th percentile). Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 2.1 s for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

Your largest element takes 16.5 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the element shown below.

The page becomes fully interactive after 24.9 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

The first text or image appears after 3.2 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 6.1 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Real visitors wait 3.8 s for the largest content to appear (75th percentile). Good is under 2.5 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 418 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

27 images have no width and height attributes, so the layout jumps as each one loads.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 143 ms to 143 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.9 s to 2.7 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 67.1 MB in 177 requests on a phone: media 49.8 MB (5), images 14.8 MB (62) and scripts 2.0 MB (35). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

1 image is downloaded at several times the size a phone draws it, for example aur_50_retina.png at 1,044 px wide, shown at 341 px. Resized copies would save about 2 KiB.

6 images (273 KiB) are JPEG, PNG or GIF. The same pictures as WebP or AVIF are usually much smaller at the same quality, and every current browser shows them.

5 images further down the page (204 KiB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 19.03 g of CO₂e: 2283.1 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

ARIA attributes must conform to valid values: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated critical by axe-core.

1 button has no accessible name, so screen readers announce just “button”.

22 text elements don't have enough contrast against the background to read easily, especially outdoors on a phone.

1 element hidden from screen readers can still receive keyboard focus.

Form elements should have a visible label: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated serious by axe-core.

Some list items are not inside a list.

5 images have no alt text, which hurts accessibility and image search.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 5 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Landmarks should have a unique role or role/label/title (i.e. accessible name) combination: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Document should not have more than one banner landmark: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

The page has no <main> landmark, so screen-reader users cannot jump straight to the content.

Page should contain a level-one heading: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

53 visible links have no text or label, so screen readers cannot say where they go.

Elements with visible text labels do not have matching accessible names. (1 element).

There is no <h1>, so neither visitors nor Google get a clear main headline.

No structured data (JSON-LD), so Google can't show rich results such as your logo, ratings or FAQs.

No Open Graph image, so links shared on LinkedIn, Slack or Facebook show no preview picture.

12 links use generic text like “click here” or “learn more”, which tells Google nothing about the page behind them.

1 link has no real href, so search engines can't follow it.

The homepage links to 640 pages on aur.edu and 97 external pages.

There is no Organization (or LocalBusiness) JSON-LD, so search engines and AI assistants have no machine-readable facts about who runs the site: its name, logo, profiles and contact details.

There is no /llms.txt, a short Markdown guide to your key pages for AI tools (llmstxt.org). It is optional and few AI tools read it yet, so treat it as a cheap extra.

/aur-difference and /rooted-history all use the title “The AUR Difference | The American University of Rome”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

/aurs-20-most-frequently-asked-questions, /aur-video-gallery, /news-events, /past-events and /honorary-degree-recipients-american-university-rome have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

/aur-difference and /rooted-history use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

Your homepage links to 1 page by a URL that isn't its canonical one, for example /rooted-history, whose canonical is /aur-difference. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

/map-and-directions, /past-events, /aur-unplugged-get-know-aur-people and /faculty-administration took over 3 s to send their HTML from our server.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 150 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

9 of 38 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

5 third-party cookies are set on load; browsers are restricting these, so whatever relies on them breaks.

The page uses 1 deprecated browser API that will stop working in future browsers (“Unload event listeners are deprecated and will be removed.”).

4 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: net::ERR_FAILED”.

2 images are served at too low a resolution for sharp phone screens.

Chrome logged issues while loading the page (“Cookie”).

2 links to other sites are dead, for example https://www.linkedin.com/edu/school?id=42888&trk=edu-cp-title (999).

No Content-Security-Policy header, the main browser-side defence against injected scripts.

HSTS is set, but max-age is 0 days; one year is the recommended minimum.

No Referrer-Policy header, so full URLs can leak to the sites you link to.

No Permissions-Policy header to switch off camera, microphone and location for embedded content.

There is no /.well-known/security.txt telling researchers how to report a security problem to you.

aur.edu has no CAA record, so any certificate authority may issue a certificate for it. A CAA record naming your provider (for example letsencrypt.org) closes that door.

Social proof on the homepage: 1 trust badge. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

No analytics or tag manager detected in the HTML, so you can't measure whether any of these fixes work.

The homepage carries about 980 words of visible text.

Email authentication: SPF record 25 points, plus 15 when it ends in -all (10 for ~all); DMARC record 25, plus 25 for a reject policy (15 for quarantine); a DKIM key on a common selector 10.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, TikTok Pixel and Yandex Metrica (measured from a US location before any click). No consent tool was detected. Visitors from the EU, UK and several US states must be asked first.

Opening the homepage sets 14 cookies, 1 of them by other companies (measured from a US location before any click).

No known cookie consent tool loads with the page. Some sites build their own banner, and some only show one to visitors from the EU.

Loading the homepage contacts 30 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.