smu.ca website review

About 535 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 770 ms faster on a phone.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, Facebook and Snapchat and others), adding 1.7 MB and 1.1 s of main-thread time.

Your mobile performance score is 69. Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 747 ms of main-thread work and 885 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.

2 images could be 56 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 400 ms faster on a phone.

17 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (343 KiB).

FontAwesome CDN costs a phone 25 ms of main-thread work and 304 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.

About 155 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

9 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 230 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

Polyfills for old browsers add 72 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 50 ms).

Critical files load one after another instead of in parallel (3 chains). Preconnecting to key origins and preloading the hero image shortens the chain.

3 KiB could be saved by minifying CSS.

The page becomes fully interactive after 17.2 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Your largest element takes 4.8 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “Two students examine equipment in a lab.”.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 522 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.0 s to 1.1 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 2.3 MB in 102 requests on a phone: scripts 1.5 MB (27), fonts 379 KiB (14) and images 321 KiB (20). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

Studentgrouphub.png 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).

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.66 g of CO₂e: 78.8 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

1 element hidden from screen readers can still receive keyboard focus.

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

The homepage links to 129 pages on smu.ca and 38 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.smu.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.smu.ca/phonebooknetworkcheck has no <title>, so Google invents the link text in results.

https://www.smu.ca/phonebooknetworkcheck is marked noindex but linked from your homepage. If it is meant to be found, remove the noindex.

https://www.smu.ca/academics/the-patrick-power-library.html, https://www.smu.ca/phonebooknetworkcheck, https://www.smu.ca/about, https://www.smu.ca/future-students/soe-programs, https://www.smu.ca/gradstudies and https://www.smu.ca/sobey/graduateprograms have no meta description, so Google writes the search snippet from whatever text it finds.

Your homepage links to 3 pages by a URL that isn't their canonical one, for example https://www.smu.ca/alert, whose canonical is https://www.smu.ca/alert/index.html. Linking straight to the canonical URL saves crawlers a detour and keeps ranking signals on one address.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 73 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

9 of 22 tappable elements near the top of the page are smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

1 third-party cookie is set on load; browsers are restricting these, so whatever relies on them breaks.

2 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Access to fetch at 'https://in.getclicky.com/in.php?site_id=101446761&href=%2F&title=Saint%20Mary%27s%20University%20in…”.

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

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.

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.

The homepage has only about 86 words of visible text; thin pages give Google and first-time buyers little to go on.

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

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 Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixel and Reddit Pixel and 1 more (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 12 cookies (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 31 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.