hercampusmedia.com website review

30 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 6.7 s.

About 494 KiB 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.

Your mobile performance score is 49. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

6 images could be 277 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 950 ms faster on a phone.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Squarespace, Google Tag Manager and Google CDN and others), adding 2.2 MB and 623 ms of main-thread time.

About 78 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.

Squarespace costs a phone 402 ms of main-thread work and 840 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.

4 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 338 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 182 ms of main-thread work and 323 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.

squarespace-cdn.com costs a phone 0 ms of main-thread work and 650 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.

Polyfills for old browsers add 33 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

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

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.

3 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (4 KiB).

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.

Your largest element takes 14.0 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “HER CAMPUS MEDIA IS THE #1 PORTFOLIO OF GEN Z MEDIA BRANDS …”.

The first text or image appears after 6.3 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 14.1 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 7.7 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Real visitors see the first content after 2.0 s (75th percentile). Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 837 ms for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 367 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

1 image 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' largest content (lcp) went from 2.6 s to 2.4 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 2.2 MB in 86 requests on a phone: scripts 1.1 MB (40), images 596 KiB (12) and fonts 334 KiB (20). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.62 g of CO₂e: 74.3 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 18 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: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

Your title is only 16 characters: “Her Campus Media”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

Structured data found (LocalBusiness, Organization and WebSite) but with 3 problems, for example “WebSite: image is not an absolute URL ("//images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5723bc3c8259b57662f…”.

The homepage links to 64 pages on hercampusmedia.com and 11 external pages.

Your Organization JSON-LD is missing name, url, logo and description. These are the facts AI assistants use to describe a business and to tell it apart from others with a similar name.

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.

/capabilities, /awards-press, /community, /contact, /brands/her-campus and /brands/college-fashionista and 8 others have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

/hc-athletic-club, /careers-at-hcm-new and /internships have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 30 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

3 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Access to XMLHttpRequest at 'https://static1.squarespace.com/static/custom-css/5723bc3c8259b57662fe80a1/5c8ff5cd104c7bc…”.

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.

HSTS is set, but max-age is 180 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.

hercampusmedia.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.

hercampusmedia.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.

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

The homepage has only about 107 words of visible text; thin pages give Google and first-time buyers little to go on.

There is no link to Google or Apple Maps. A directions link is one tap for a phone visitor.

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

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 Comscore, Google Ads, 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 13 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.