rivers.org website review

About 723 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 4.6 s faster on a phone.

27 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (799 KiB).

13 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 2.2 s.

20 images could be 1.9 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 450 ms faster on a phone.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (myschoolapp.com, Facebook and Google Tag Manager and others), adding 11.2 MB and 934 ms of main-thread time.

About 186 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 910 ms faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 53. Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

myschoolcdn.com costs a phone 14 ms of main-thread work and 9.5 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.

Polyfills for old browsers add 35 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 600 ms faster on a phone.

myschoolapp.com costs a phone 455 ms of main-thread work and 487 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 3.2 s on main-thread work while loading, 1.4 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

Vimeo costs a phone 57 ms of main-thread work and 533 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.

35 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

18 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

11 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 158 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.

Scripts make the browser recalculate the layout repeatedly while the page loads, which wastes processor time on phones.

Your largest element takes 35.5 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “At The Rivers School, academic ambition and community conne…”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 37.3 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

The first text or image appears after 5.6 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 10.3 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 82 ms to 88 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 16.5 MB in 144 requests on a phone: images 14.5 MB (53), scripts 1.4 MB (34) and fonts 247 KiB (6). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

7 images weigh 6.6 MB together. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

14 images (7.5 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.

6 images further down the page (913 KiB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

3 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example TRS.png at 1,285 px wide, shown at 285 px. Resized copies would save about 145 KiB.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 4.68 g of CO₂e: 561.7 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

17 text elements don't have enough contrast against the background to read easily, especially outdoors on a phone.

Links must have discernible text: 14 elements on the page fail this check, rated serious by axe-core.

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

1 frame has no title, so screen-reader users cannot tell what it contains.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 46 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

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

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

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

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.rivers.org/sitemap.xml, so Google discovers your pages only by following links.

10 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 245 pages on rivers.org and 33 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 /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.

/app has no <title>, so Google invents the link text in results.

/giving and /giving/giving all use the title “Giving | The Rivers School | Independent Day School - Grades 6-12”, and 1 other title repeat too. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

/app, /about-us/directory, /livestream, /about-us/at-a-glance, /news-archive and /the-riparian and 9 others have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

Your homepage links to 2 pages by a URL that isn't their canonical one, for example /giving, whose canonical is /giving/giving. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

/app, /livestream, /news-archive, /quicklinks/school-calendar, /giving/give-online and /alumni/volunteer have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 66 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 image failed to load on a phone, for example https://www.rivers.org/.

The page uses 2 deprecated browser APIs that will stop working in future browsers (“Unload event listeners are deprecated and will be removed.”).

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

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

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

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 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 713 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Meta Pixel (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 7 cookies, 2 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 25 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.