nwu.ac.za website review

About 777 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 3.3 s faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 49 (desktop: 76). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

7 third-party services load with your homepage (YouTube, Google Tag Manager and Cloudflare CDN and others), adding 1.5 MB and 1.1 s of main-thread time.

YouTube costs a phone 728 ms of main-thread work and 977 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 600 ms.

About 150 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.

5 images could be 480 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 285 ms of main-thread work and 178 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.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 300 ms).

8 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 255 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

A phone's processor spends 2.3 s on main-thread work while loading, 1.1 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

Cloudflare CDN costs a phone 74 ms of main-thread work and 361 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.

Desktop scores 76 but mobile only 49. 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.

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 9.8 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “Welcome to North-West University (NWU) – It All Starts Here!”.

The first text or image appears after 7.3 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 14.2 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 8.6 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Real visitors see the first content after 1.9 s (75th percentile). Good is under 1.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 329 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' tap response (inp) went from 180 ms to 184 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 2.3 MB in 40 requests on a phone: scripts 1.5 MB (9), images 623 KiB (14) and stylesheets 112 KiB (5). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

baner_2026_10_27.png.webp 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 0.66 g of CO₂e: 79.2 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Required ARIA attributes must be provided: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated critical by axe-core.

Certain ARIA roles must contain particular children: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated critical by axe-core.

ARIA input fields must have an accessible name: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated serious by axe-core.

Form elements should have a visible label: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated serious by axe-core.

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

Headings should not be empty: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated minor by axe-core.

Headings skip levels (h2 → h4), which makes the page harder to scan with a screen reader.

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

Your title is 90 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “Welcome to North-West University (NWU) – It All Starts Here! | NWU | North-West University”.

No structured data (JSON-LD), so Google can't show rich results such as your logo, ratings or FAQs.

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

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

5 links use generic text like “click here” or “learn more”, which tells Google nothing about the page behind them.

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

The homepage links to 73 pages on nwu.ac.za and 114 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://www.nwu.ac.za/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.nwu.ac.za/af, https://www.nwu.ac.za/tn, https://www.nwu.ac.za/welcome, https://www.nwu.ac.za/guiding-documents-governance-and-management and https://www.nwu.ac.za/gov_man/policy/index.html have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

Your homepage links to 1 page by a URL that isn't its canonical one, for example https://www.nwu.ac.za/nwu/students/int.html, whose canonical is https://www.nwu.ac.za/international-students. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

https://www.nwu.ac.za/af, https://www.nwu.ac.za/welcome, https://www.nwu.ac.za/governance-and-management/council-committees, https://www.nwu.ac.za/governance-and-management/management-structures, https://www.nwu.ac.za/guiding-documents-governance-and-management and https://www.nwu.ac.za/gov_man/policy/index.html and 2 others took over 3 s to send their HTML from our server.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 47 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

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

5 third-party cookies are set on load; browsers are restricting these, so whatever relies on them breaks.

1 image is served at too low a resolution for sharp phone screens.

Chrome logged issues while loading the page (“Cookie”).

On a phone, there is no call to action on the first screen: visitors have to scroll to find out what to do next.

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

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

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 527 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 5 cookies, 1 of them by other companies (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 12 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.