whitman.edu website review

14 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 2.0 s.

23 images could be 2.5 MB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, technolutions.net and Vimeo and others), adding 6.9 MB and 1.2 s of main-thread time.

About 740 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 600 ms faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 51. Pages that score under 90 lose visitors before the first paint.

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 705 ms of main-thread work and 668 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 141 ms of main-thread work and 5.8 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.

30 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (524 KiB).

A phone's processor spends 3.5 s on main-thread work while loading, 1.8 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

13 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 294 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

The page has 1,576 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

Polyfills for old browsers add 41 KiB JavaScript that modern phones do not need. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

About 23 KiB of CSS is downloaded but never applied on this page.

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.

5 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

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.

Your largest element takes 34.4 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the text “A Place Like No Other”.

The page becomes fully interactive after 41.6 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 3.0 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 3.2 s for the largest content to appear (75th percentile). Good is under 2.5 s.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 88 ms to 113 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-31, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.5 s to 1.9 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Real visitors see the first content after 2.4 s (75th percentile). Good is under 1.8 s.

Real visitors wait 1.2 s for your server to start answering (75th percentile). Good is under 800 ms.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 473 ms in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

Your homepage downloads 19.0 MB in 176 requests on a phone: images 11.8 MB (85), other files 5.3 MB (41) and scripts 1.5 MB (30). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

4 images weigh 3.2 MB together. On a phone connection a single image that size takes seconds.

6 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example hispanic-studies-banner.jpg at 1,440 px wide, shown at 358 px. Resized copies would save about 2.0 MB.

40 images further down the page (10.4 MB) download before anyone scrolls to them. Adding loading="lazy" lets the first screen load first.

39 images (10.3 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 5.40 g of CO₂e: 647.5 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

Page should contain a level-one heading: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

1 visible link has no text or label, so screen readers cannot say where it goes.

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

Your title is only 15 characters: “Whitman College”. Between 30 and 65 characters leaves room to say what you do and for whom.

Your meta description is 162 characters; Google truncates after about 160, so the end of your pitch is cut.

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

The homepage links to 323 pages on whitman.edu and 43 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.whitman.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.whitman.edu/admission-and-aid/visit-whitman, https://www.whitman.edu/alumni, https://www.whitman.edu/campus-map, https://www.whitman.edu/communications, https://www.whitman.edu/giving and https://www.whitman.edu/human-resources and 1 other have no <h1> headline, so visitors and search engines get no clear main topic.

We fetched 15 pages linked from your homepage (of 138 found) and read each the way a search engine does.

1 image failed to load on a phone, for example https://www.whitman.edu/.

3 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.”).

2 errors were logged to the browser console while the page loaded, for example “Access to XMLHttpRequest at 'https://cdn.plyr.io/3.7.8/plyr.css' from origin 'https://www.whitman.edu' has been blocked…”.

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: 1 testimonial or review block. 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 link to Google or Apple Maps. A directions link is one tap for a phone visitor.

The homepage carries about 2,540 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Tag Manager 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 8 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 32 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.