saic.edu website review

About 2.0 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 9.9 s faster on a phone.

About 448 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.4 s faster on a phone.

YouTube costs a phone 1.7 s of main-thread work and 2.9 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.

11 images could be 515 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 1.1 s faster on a phone.

2 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 1.4 s.

Your mobile performance score is 24. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

A phone's processor spends 8.0 s on main-thread work while loading, 4.6 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

The page has 3,604 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (YouTube, Google Tag Manager and Unpkg and others), adding 4.1 MB and 3.7 s of main-thread time.

20 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 904 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 643 ms of main-thread work and 548 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.

Unpkg costs a phone 439 ms of main-thread work and 96 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.

20 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (287 KiB).

Hotjar costs a phone 324 ms of main-thread work and 65 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.

Polyfills for old browsers add 48 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.

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

The first text or image appears after 17.1 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Your largest element takes 25.9 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “artist displaying work”.

Visually, the page fills in at 17.1 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 37.8 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 1.9 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 199 ms to 255 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

The layout shifts by 0.108 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.5 s to 2.4 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 6.7 MB in 156 requests on a phone: scripts 4.0 MB (54), images 1.7 MB (31) and stylesheets 543 KiB (8). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

082_hand-knitwear-design_05.2025.jpg.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).

4 images further down the page (160 KiB) 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 1.90 g of CO₂e: 227.7 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

2 buttons have no accessible name, so screen readers announce just “button”.

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

ARIA dialog and alertdialog nodes should have an accessible name: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated serious by axe-core.

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

Landmarks should have a unique role or role/label/title (i.e. accessible name) combination: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 2 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Contentinfo landmark should not be contained in another landmark: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

Document should not have more than one contentinfo landmark: 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.

10 visible links have no text or label, so screen readers cannot say where they go.

Elements with visible text labels do not have matching accessible names. (2 elements).

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

Your title is 74 characters, so Google will cut it off around 60: “School of the Art Institute of Chicago | Top Fine Arts College in The U.S.”.

Structured data found ((untyped), EducationalOrganization and WebPage) but with 1 problem, for example “block has no @type”.

3 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 set, so this is minor.

The homepage links to 205 pages on saic.edu and 23 external pages.

There is no https://www.saic.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.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 97 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 image failed to load on a phone, for example https://bat.bing.com/action/0?ti=25115105&tm=gtm002&Ver=2&mid=fc6ced4d-ab5c-40b8-a020-6f6dd5c1d297&bo=1&sid=c56b0b90d6b811f19c4f2f5afe4e62e7&vid=c56b22d0d6b811f1a7a01b313806f971&vids=1&msclkid=N&pi=91.

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

4 of 13 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

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

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.

No analytics or tag manager detected in the HTML, so you can't measure whether any of these fixes work.

The homepage shows no opening hours. If customers visit or call, show when.

There is no link to Google or Apple Maps. A directions link is one tap for a phone visitor.

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 1,240 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Hotjar and LinkedIn Insight and 7 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 26 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 45 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.