isi.edu website review

10 images could be 1.2 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

About 133 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 910 ms faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 68. Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

12 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 750 ms.

7 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, FontAwesome CDN and cloudflare.com and others), adding 2.9 MB and 262 ms of main-thread time.

About 153 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

usc.edu costs a phone 0 ms of main-thread work and 2.3 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.

3 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 136 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

2 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (10 KiB).

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

6 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.

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 15.7 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “USC President Beong-Soo Kim, Mary Stevens, Mark Stevens and…”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 16.0 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Real visitors wait 265 ms for the page to respond to a tap (75th percentile). Good is under 200 ms.

Real visitors wait 1.2 s for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

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

Visually, the page fills in at 4.5 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 228 ms to 232 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 6.7 MB in 79 requests on a phone: images 5.1 MB (31), other files 727 KiB (12) and scripts 403 KiB (16). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

2 images weigh 2.0 MB together. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

6 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example For-WP-1200x600-2.png at 1,200 px wide, shown at 350 px. Resized copies would save about 529 KiB.

14 images (2.1 MB) 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.

2 images further down the page (282 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 1.90 g of CO₂e: 228.5 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: 3 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Contentinfo landmark should not be contained in another landmark: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

Elements with visible text labels do not have matching accessible names. (3 elements).

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

The homepage links to 81 pages on isi.edu and 53 external pages.

There is no https://www.isi.edu/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.

https://www.isi.edu/directory, https://www.isi.edu/special-events, https://www.isi.edu/about/honors, https://www.isi.edu/about/institute-achievement-awards, https://www.isi.edu/about/history and https://www.isi.edu/about/cloudwalkers and 4 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 57 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

8 of 27 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

2 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “%c%d font-size:0;color:transparent NaN”.

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

Your homepage shows a street address but no LocalBusiness JSON-LD, so Google and AI assistants have to guess your address, hours and phone from the page text.

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

The homepage shows no opening hours. If customers visit or call, show when.

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.

The homepage carries about 1,088 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads 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 4 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 11 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.