clever.com website review

About 669 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 4.8 s faster on a phone.

12 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 2.3 s.

Your mobile performance score is 44 (desktop: 85). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

A phone's processor spends 4.0 s on main-thread work while loading, 2.0 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

5 images could be 1.6 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

7 third-party services load with your homepage (Google CDN, Google Tag Manager and Optanon and others), adding 1.3 MB and 1.3 s of main-thread time.

Google CDN costs a phone 589 ms of main-thread work and 733 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.

About 81 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 450 ms faster on a phone.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 387 ms of main-thread work and 306 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.

6 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (79 KiB).

15 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 295 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

5 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

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

Desktop scores 85 but mobile only 44. A gap that wide usually means heavy scripts and images that hit phones hardest.

Polyfills for old browsers add 9 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

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.

The first text or image appears after 9.3 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 16.9 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “The identity platform for education”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 18.1 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 9.3 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

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

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 498 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 121 ms to 123 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.2 s to 2.2 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

1-Clever-Homepage-CR-Image-2025.png weighs 584 KiB. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

Your homepage downloads 3.9 MB in 80 requests on a phone: images 1.8 MB (37), scripts 1.4 MB (19) and other files 386 KiB (10). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

4 images further down the page (1.2 MB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

1 image is downloaded at several times the size a phone draws it, for example GettyImages-493189929-scaled.jpg at 2,560 px wide, shown at 416 px. Resized copies would save about 347 KiB.

2 images (538 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.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 1.11 g of CO₂e: 133.2 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Some lists contain elements other than list items, which screen readers announce wrongly.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 19 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

1 form field has no label, so screen readers announce an empty box and autofill guesses.

No meta description, so Google writes its own snippet from whatever text it finds.

Your title is only 6 characters: “Clever”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

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

No Open Graph image (also missing: og:title, og:description), so links shared on LinkedIn, Slack or Facebook show no preview picture.

1 link use generic text like “click here” or “learn more”, which tells Google nothing about the page behind it.

No twitter:card tag. X falls back to Open Graph, which is incomplete here.

The homepage links to 151 pages on clever.com and 23 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.

/schools, /solutions/data-and-access, /products/rostering, /products/badges, /solutions/identity-and-security and /products/clever-idm and 9 others have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 52 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

23 of 79 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

Large scripts ship without source maps.

No Strict-Transport-Security header, so browsers may still try plain http first on a return visit.

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

Neither X-Frame-Options nor a CSP frame-ancestors policy is set, so any site can embed yours in a frame.

X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff is missing, so browsers may guess file types.

1 link go through two or more redirects, for example https://schools.clever.com/.

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.

clever.com 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.

clever.com's DNS answers are not signed. DNSSEC stops attackers forging them to send visitors or email elsewhere; most registrars switch it on in a click, though most sites still run without it.

On a phone, there is no call to action on the first screen: visitors have to scroll to find out what to do next.

Social proof on the homepage: 2 trust badges. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

No phone number or email link on the homepage, so ready-to-buy visitors have one fewer way to reach you.

There is no form on the homepage, so every lead has to click through to another page first.

No guarantee or risk reducer (money-back, free trial, no credit card) is mentioned, which is often what tips a hesitant visitor.

The homepage carries about 505 words of visible text.

DMARC is set to p=none, so mail pretending to be clever.com is still delivered. Reports are on, so moving to quarantine is the next step.

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 Analytics and Google Tag Manager (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (OneTrust) is installed; check it blocks these until visitors agree where the law requires it.

Opening the homepage sets 7 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 9 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.