mchenry.edu website review

32 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (4.5 MB).

10 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 4.0 s.

About 563 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.9 s faster on a phone.

4 images could be 281 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 1.6 s faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 42 (desktop: 81). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Other Google APIs/SDKs and Clarity and others), adding 1.2 MB and 1.2 s of main-thread time.

About 120 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 890 ms faster on a phone.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 520 ms of main-thread work and 337 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.

Other Google APIs/SDKs costs a phone 341 ms of main-thread work and 262 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.

A phone's processor spends 3.7 s on main-thread work while loading, 1.2 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

32 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

13 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 301 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Cloudflare CDN costs a phone 78 ms of main-thread work and 374 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.

36 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 81 but mobile only 42. A gap that wide usually means heavy scripts and images that hit phones hardest.

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.

Your largest element takes 15.2 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “McHenry County College featured video”.

The first text or image appears after 6.9 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 15.2 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 7.9 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 631 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

2 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' largest content (lcp) went from 1.3 s to 1.5 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Chrome's UX Report (opens in a new tab) has too little real-visitor traffic for this site, so the figures here are lab measurements from Google's test phone on a throttled 4G connection.

Your homepage downloads 5.8 MB in 77 requests on a phone: media 3.5 MB (1), scripts 1.1 MB (35) and images 644 KiB (15). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

1 image is downloaded at several times the size a phone draws it, for example Nursing-Lab-2025-21-1.jpg at 1,400 px wide, shown at 330 px. Resized copies would save about 65 KiB.

5 images (468 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.

1 image further down the page (131 KiB) download before anyone scrolls to it. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 1.63 g of CO₂e: 196.1 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

4 tap targets are too small or too close together to hit reliably with a finger.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 6 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

ARIA role should be appropriate for the element: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated minor by axe-core.

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

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

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

The homepage links to 95 pages on mchenry.edu and 12 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 https://mchenry.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.

Your homepage links to 15 pages by a URL that isn't their canonical one, for example https://mchenry.edu/mymcc/index.html, whose canonical is https://mchenry.edu/mymcc. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 67 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

4 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Failed to load resource: net::ERR_FAILED”.

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.

Social proof on the homepage: 16 testimonial or review blocks. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

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 407 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Microsoft Clarity (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 9 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 23 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.