insidehighered.com website review

A phone's processor spends 5.5 s on main-thread work while loading, 3.3 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

The page has 4,550 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google/Doubleclick Ads, Google Tag Manager and JSDelivr CDN and others), adding 1.9 MB and 1.9 s of main-thread time.

Google/Doubleclick Ads costs a phone 918 ms of main-thread work and 1.0 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.

Your mobile performance score is 51 (desktop: 69). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

48 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (518 KiB).

About 616 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 473 ms of main-thread work and 493 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.

3 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 400 ms.

17 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 271 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

About 63 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

3 images could be 54 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

Polyfills for old browsers add 16 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.

The page becomes fully interactive after 17.1 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 942 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Visually, the page fills in at 6.8 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Your largest element takes 4.5 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “A photo illustration of a vintage television sitting on a p…”.

The first text or image appears after 2.6 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your homepage downloads 2.4 MB in 131 requests on a phone: scripts 1.7 MB (39), images 470 KiB (32) and other files 174 KiB (44). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

Tv_column.jpg is on the first screen but marked loading="lazy", so the browser waits before fetching it and the page looks finished later. Load it eagerly (and give it fetchpriority="high" if it is the main image).

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.69 g of CO₂e: 83.2 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Links must have discernible text: 9 elements on the page fail this check, rated serious by axe-core.

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

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Alternative text of images should not be repeated as text: 11 elements on the page fail this check, rated minor by axe-core.

Headings skip levels (h3 → h5 and h3 → h5), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

Your title is 72 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Career Advice, Events and Jobs”.

Structured data found ((untyped)) but with 1 problem, for example “block has no @type”.

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 set, so this is minor.

The homepage links to 420 pages on insidehighered.com and 32 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.

/news, /news/faculty, /news/faculty/contingent-faculty, /news/faculty/curriculum, /news/faculty/teaching and /news/faculty/learning-assessment and 7 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 180 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

9 of 40 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

1 link to other sites is dead, for example https://solutions.insidehighered.com/branding (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.

1 link go through two or more redirects, for example https://www.facebook.com/pages/Inside-Higher-Ed/22711416526.

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.

insidehighered.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.

insidehighered.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.

No testimonials, customer logos, ratings or customer counts on the homepage: nothing tells a new visitor that others already trust you.

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

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 1,142 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 and Google Tag Manager (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (Cookiebot) is installed; check it blocks these until visitors agree where the law requires it.

Opening the homepage sets 2 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 10 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.