rwu.edu website review

About 12.0 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 1.2 s faster on a phone.

YouTube costs a phone 11.1 s of main-thread work and 20.3 MB of downloads while your page loads. That alone is enough to make taps feel slow. Loading it after the page is usable, or only on the pages that need it, takes that off the critical path.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 2.9 s of main-thread work and 2.0 MB of downloads while your page loads. That alone is enough to make taps feel slow. 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 30.1 s on main-thread work while loading, 14.6 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

About 248 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 1.6 s faster on a phone.

4 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 1.8 s.

Your mobile performance score is 25. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (YouTube, Google Tag Manager and Facebook and others), adding 23.6 MB and 15.4 s of main-thread time.

5 images could be 1.6 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 350 ms faster on a phone.

61 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (563 KiB).

20 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 626 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Facebook costs a phone 486 ms of main-thread work and 365 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 402 ms of main-thread work and 686 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 350 ms).

Polyfills for old browsers add 70 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

15 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

4 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

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.

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.

The first text or image appears after 8.4 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 20.7 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Aerial photo of the Roger Williams University campus.”.

Visually, the page fills in at 43.4 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 10.8 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

The page becomes fully interactive after 171.2 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Real visitors wait 249 ms for the page to respond to a tap (75th percentile). Good is under 200 ms.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 164 ms to 202 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 29.1 MB in 650 requests on a phone: scripts 21.4 MB (166), HTML 2.4 MB (113) and images 2.2 MB (68). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

1 image is downloaded at several times the size a phone draws it, for example Homepage_Hero_2.jpg.webp at 1,400 px wide, shown at 390 px. Resized copies would save about 37 KiB.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 8.24 g of CO₂e: 988.7 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Elements with role="dialog" or role="alertdialog" do not have accessible names. (1 element).

Your title is only 25 characters: “Roger Williams University”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

Your meta description is 218 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

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 rwu.edu and 37 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.rwu.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.

https://www.rwu.edu/majors-programs has no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 74 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 image failed to load on a phone, for example https://d.adroll.com/cm/experian/out?af0=0fe6f973&adroll_fpc=133408d1b4a4a79c1f8e78c3eb8d637f-1793485048231&pv=39907010252.89458&arrfrr=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rwu.edu%2F&ats1=manual&advertisable=VLWPZ76U4B.

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

3 of 12 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

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

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

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: 2 trust badges. 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.

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 1,312 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, LinkedIn Insight and Meta Pixel and 3 mores (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 27 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 52 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.