ratemyprofessors.com website review

About 395 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.1 s faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 65 (desktop: 55). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

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

1 image could be 94 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 550 ms faster on a phone.

6 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (71 KiB).

4 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 405 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

3 third-party services load with your homepage (Optanon, Help Scout and cloudfront.net), adding 297 KiB and 144 ms of main-thread time.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 100 ms).

About 19 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

Polyfills for old browsers add 9 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.

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 9.2 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “Enter your school to get started I'd like to look up a prof…”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 9.2 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Real visitors wait 237 ms for the page to respond to a tap (75th percentile). Good is under 200 ms.

For real visitors the layout shifts by 0.18 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 360 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Visually, the page fills in at 3.5 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-03, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.3 s to 1.4 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

1 image further down the page (28 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 0.43 g of CO₂e: 51.9 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

1 text element doesn't have enough contrast against the background to read easily, especially outdoors on a phone.

<html> element must have a lang attribute: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated serious by axe-core.

2 images have no alt text, which hurts accessibility and image search.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 9 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

The page has no <main> landmark, so screen-reader users cannot jump straight to the content.

Landmarks should have a unique role or role/label/title (i.e. accessible name) combination: 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.

The <html> element has no lang attribute, so screen readers may read the page in the wrong voice and accent.

Your robots.txt disallows the whole site for every crawler, so search engines are told to stay out.

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

Your title is only 18 characters: “Rate My Professors”. 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.

Your meta description is only 38 characters: “Find and rate your professor or school”. 70 to 160 characters is enough to sell the click.

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

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

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

The homepage links to 6 pages on ratemyprofessors.com and 1 external page.

Your robots.txt shuts out ChatGPT search (OAI-SearchBot), ChatGPT (ChatGPT-User), Claude search (Claude-SearchBot), Claude (Claude-User), Perplexity (PerplexityBot) and Perplexity (Perplexity-User). These fetch pages to answer people's questions and cite the source, so your site can't be quoted or linked in those answers.

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.ratemyprofessors.com/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.

robots.txt blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended and CCBot, which collect pages to train models. That's a legitimate choice and doesn't by itself stop the site appearing in AI answers.

https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/guidelines, https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/terms-of-use, https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/privacy and https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/copyright use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

We fetched 4 pages linked from your homepage and read each the way a search engine does.

4 of 5 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

The page has no <!DOCTYPE html>, so browsers render it in quirks mode.

Large scripts ship without source maps.

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 phone number or email link on the homepage, so ready-to-buy visitors have one fewer way to reach you.

The homepage has only about 70 words of visible text; thin pages give Google and first-time buyers little to go on.

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.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Amazon Ads, Criteo, Google Ads, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager and 3 mores (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (OneTrust) is installed; check it blocks these until visitors agree where the law requires it.

Opening the homepage sets 16 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 43 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.