uca.ac.uk website review

37 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (786 KiB).

About 850 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 2.0 s faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 30 (desktop: 40). Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

24 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 600 ms faster on a phone.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, terminalfour.net and cookiepro.com and others), adding 2.8 MB and 1.1 s of main-thread time.

5 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 950 ms.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 671 ms of main-thread work and 1.0 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.

About 88 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 460 ms faster on a phone.

terminalfour.net costs a phone 226 ms of main-thread work and 1.3 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.

61 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

A phone's processor spends 2.1 s on main-thread work while loading, 1.1 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

The page has 2,122 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

Polyfills for old browsers add 51 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 200 ms faster on a phone.

9 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 187 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

The HTML itself could arrive sooner: redirects, a slow server response or missing compression delay everything after it.

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.

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.

For real visitors the layout shifts by 1.00 (75th percentile). Good is under 0.1.

Your largest element takes 10.2 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the element shown below.

The layout shifts by 1.214 while loading, so content jumps under the reader's thumb. Good is under 0.1.

The page becomes fully interactive after 21.5 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Visually, the page fills in at 7.6 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

The first text or image appears after 3.3 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 310 ms for the page to respond to a tap (75th percentile). Good is under 200 ms.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 324 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-17, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 301 ms to 312 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 9.4 MB in 123 requests on a phone: media 4.9 MB (1), images 2.2 MB (40) and scripts 1.9 MB (31). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

12 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example online-uca-showcase-pic-2-1024x1024.jpg at 1,024 px wide, shown at 188 px. Resized copies would save about 809 KiB.

16 images further down the page (1.6 MB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

12 images (1.3 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.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 2.67 g of CO₂e: 320.7 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

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

Some list items are not inside a list.

Interactive controls must not be nested: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated serious by axe-core.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 9 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 Open Graph image, 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 218 pages on uca.ac.uk and 31 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.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 116 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=26331176&tm=gtm002&Ver=2&mid=816616be-b0a3-4856-884c-393dd9ccf2a2&bo=1&sid=d7c665c0d0ca11f1b5f0254bca5241e5&vid=d7c68a80d0ca11f1b8735337b9ec0b49&vids=1&msclkid=N&pi=91.

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

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 620 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixel and Microsoft Ads and 3 mores (measured from a US location before any click). A consent tool (OneTrust) is installed; check it blocks these until visitors agree where the law requires it.

Opening the homepage sets 5 cookies (measured from a US location before any click).

Loading the homepage contacts 23 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.