shad.ca website review

4 images could be 1.4 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 1.4 s faster on a phone.

39 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 2.4 s.

The page has 3,468 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

About 1.0 MB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page.

Your mobile performance score is 62 (desktop: 88). Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Facebook and Google CDN and others), adding 1.8 MB and 719 ms of main-thread time.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 340 ms of main-thread work and 608 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 3.9 s on main-thread work while loading, 1.7 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

About 84 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 300 ms faster on a phone.

11 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (309 KiB).

Google CDN costs a phone 75 ms of main-thread work and 348 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.

Vimeo costs a phone 34 ms of main-thread work and 522 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.

11 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 192 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Polyfills for old browsers add 23 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

Desktop scores 88 but mobile only 62. A gap that wide usually means heavy scripts and images that hit phones hardest.

6 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.

Real visitors wait 4.1 s for the largest content to appear (75th percentile). Good is under 2.5 s.

Real visitors see the first content after 3.4 s (75th percentile). Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 3.2 s for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

Visually, the page fills in at 15.4 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The page becomes fully interactive after 18.8 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Your largest element takes 5.2 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image. Most of its time is resource load delay (7.3 s).

Real visitors wait 209 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 125 ms to 216 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 2.6 s to 3.5 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

The first text or image appears after 2.3 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 266 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

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

Your homepage downloads 5.0 MB in 138 requests on a phone: images 2.6 MB (21), scripts 2.1 MB (48) and stylesheets 197 KiB (47). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

partners.jpg weighs 1.2 MB. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

2 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example partners.jpg at 1,920 px wide, shown at 412 px. Resized copies would save about 940 KiB.

1 image (1.2 MB) is 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.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 1.41 g of CO₂e: 169.1 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Certain ARIA roles must contain particular children: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated critical by axe-core.

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

1 tap target is too small or too close together to hit reliably with a finger.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 42 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.

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

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

Your title is only 10 characters: “About Shad”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

10 links use generic text like “click here” or “learn more”, which tells Google nothing about the page behind them.

The homepage links to 237 pages on shad.ca and 68 external pages.

There is no https://www.shad.ca/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.shad.ca/about declares the homepage as its canonical URL, which tells Google it is a copy of the homepage and keeps it out of search results. A site-wide template setting usually causes this.

/ and https://www.shad.ca/about all use the title “About Shad”. Search engines can't tell which page to show for a search, so each competes with the others.

https://www.shad.ca/apply, https://www.shad.ca/participate, https://www.shad.ca/alumni, https://www.shad.ca/fr, https://www.shad.ca/participate/indigenous and https://www.shad.ca/impact and 5 others use the same meta description. A description written for each page earns more clicks.

https://www.shad.ca/apply, https://www.shad.ca/participate, https://www.shad.ca/alumni, https://www.shad.ca/fr, https://www.shad.ca/participate/indigenous and https://www.shad.ca/impact and 7 others have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

https://www.shad.ca/fr, https://www.shad.ca/participate/indigenous, https://www.shad.ca/impact, https://www.shad.ca/about, https://www.shad.ca/leadership-team-and-board/rob-esselment and https://www.shad.ca/campuses and 1 other took over 3 s to send their HTML from our server.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 27 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

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

The page uses 1 deprecated browser API that will stop working in future browsers (“Unload event listeners are deprecated and will be removed.”).

1 error was logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “%c%d font-size:0;color:transparent NaN”.

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

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 797 words of visible text.

The page uses urgency cues (a countdown or limited-time wording).

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixel and Microsoft Clarity (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 10 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 21 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.