gradescope.com website review

71 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (5.5 MB).

7 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 4.8 s.

About 686 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.3 s faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 50 (desktop: 69). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

About 92 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.

6 third-party services load with your homepage (aptrinsic.com, Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics and others), adding 2.4 MB and 227 ms of main-thread time.

8 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 303 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

The page has 2,859 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

A phone's processor spends 2.2 s on main-thread work while loading, 823 ms of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

Amazon Web Services costs a phone 0 ms of main-thread work and 1.9 MB 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.

14 images could be 153 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

The HTML itself could arrive sooner: redirects, a slow server response or missing compression delay everything after it.

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

Polyfills for old browsers add 12 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.

4 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

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 12.5 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 13.0 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “Gradescope helps you seamlessly administer and grade all of…”.

Visually, the page fills in at 12.5 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 14.9 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Real visitors wait 956 ms for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 273 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 140 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 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.7 s to 1.9 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 5.9 MB in 82 requests on a phone: media 1.9 MB (4), scripts 1.6 MB (14) and images 1.1 MB (41). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

8 images (410 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.

3 images further down the page (76 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 1.67 g of CO₂e: 200.0 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Scrollable region must have keyboard access: 4 elements on the page fail this check, rated serious by axe-core.

1 text element doesn't have enough contrast against the background to read easily, especially outdoors on a phone.

3 form fields have no label, so screen readers announce an empty box and autofill guesses.

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

Headings skip levels (h1 → h3, h1 → h3 and h1 → h3), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

Your title is only 10 characters: “Gradescope”. 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.

There are 10 <h1> headlines (“Log in with your Gradescope account”, “Deliver and Grade Your Assessments Anywhere” and “Grade All Subjects”). One clear main headline is easier for people and search engines.

No canonical URL, so duplicate versions of the homepage (with or without www, with tracking parameters) can split ranking signals.

No XML sitemap at https://www.gradescope.com/sitemap.xml, so Google discovers your pages only by following links.

No twitter:card tag. X falls back to Open Graph, which is set, so this is minor.

The homepage links to 15 pages on gradescope.com and 15 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.

/pricing and /get-a-demo are marked noindex but linked from your homepage. If they are meant to be found, remove the noindex.

/ and /saml all use the title “Gradescope”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

/pricing and /get-a-demo have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

/saml, /get_started, /roadmap, /tos and /privacy use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

/saml has no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

/roadmap has under 150 words in the HTML. Thin pages rarely rank; if the text loads with JavaScript, crawlers that don't run it see even less.

We fetched 7 pages linked from your homepage and read each the way a search engine does.

1 error was logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: net::ERR_FAILED”.

6 images are displayed at the wrong aspect ratio, so they look stretched or squashed.

Large scripts ship without source maps.

1 link from your homepage to your own site is broken, for example https://www.gradescope.com/auth/google_oauth2 (404).

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.

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

X-XSS-Protection is set to “1; mode=block”; the header is deprecated and can introduce bugs. Use 0 or remove it.

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

gradescope.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.

Your longest form asks for 11 fields (0 required). Every extra field lowers completion.

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 1,101 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 Analytics and Google Tag Manager (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 5 cookies (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 8 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.