openstax.org website review

19 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (2.5 MB).

6 images could be 2.2 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 5.2 s faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 46 (desktop: 58). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

About 162 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 460 ms faster on a phone.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 166 ms of main-thread work and 357 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.

6 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, cdn-cookieyes.com and Crazy Egg and others), adding 393 KiB and 178 ms of main-thread time.

7 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 157 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

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.

For real visitors the layout shifts by 1.34 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

Your largest element takes 12.1 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Students standing in a hallway holding print and digital Op…”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 12.5 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

The layout shifts by 0.509 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

Real visitors wait 3.9 s for the largest content to appear (75th percentile). Good is under 2.5 s.

Real visitors wait 355 ms for the page to respond to a tap (75th percentile). Good is under 200 ms.

Real visitors see the first content after 2.5 s (75th percentile). Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 849 ms for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 300 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 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 3.9 s to 3.8 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

3 images weigh 2.3 MB together. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

1 image is downloaded at several times the size a phone draws it, for example homepage_hero_7PgFmgy.jpg at 1,920 px wide, shown at 375 px. Resized copies would save about 763 KiB.

Your homepage downloads 3.4 MB in 129 requests on a phone: images 2.4 MB (14), scripts 779 KiB (66) and other files 135 KiB (43). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

3 images (2.3 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.

5 images further down the page (1.2 MB) 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 0.95 g of CO₂e: 114.5 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Heading levels should only increase by one: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

Elements with visible text labels do not have matching accessible names. (1 element).

There is no <h1>, so neither visitors nor Google get a clear main headline.

Your title is only 8 characters: “OpenStax”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

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

No canonical URL, so duplicate versions of the homepage (with or without www, with tracking parameters) can split ranking signals.

The homepage links to only 0 pages on your own site, so visitors and crawlers find few routes into the rest of it.

1 link use generic text like “click here” or “learn more”, which tells Google nothing about the page behind it.

A phone browser shows 785 words, but the HTML your server sends has only 0. GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot read that HTML without running JavaScript, so they see an almost empty page. Server-side rendering or pre-rendering fixes it.

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://openstax.org/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.

We found no call-to-action buttons or links (such as “Book a demo” or “Get a quote”) anywhere on the homepage.

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 785 words of visible text.

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 (CookieYes) 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 7 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.