willamette.edu website review

Google Tag Manager costs a phone 2.2 s of main-thread work and 668 KiB 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.

6 images could be 283 KiB smaller with modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sizes that fit a phone screen. Google estimates it would make the page about 1.0 s faster on a phone.

Your mobile performance score is 33. Under 50 is Google's “poor” band: many phone visitors leave before the page is usable.

A phone's processor spends 9.5 s on main-thread work while loading, 5.7 s of it running JavaScript. Above 2 s, taps and scrolls feel sluggish.

8 third-party services load with your homepage (Google Tag Manager, covecreekproductions.com and Facebook and others), adding 2.5 MB and 4.6 s of main-thread time.

covecreekproductions.com costs a phone 903 ms of main-thread work and 906 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.

17 files are served with short cache lifetimes, so returning visitors download them again (977 KiB).

Facebook costs a phone 712 ms of main-thread work and 281 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 long tasks block the main thread while loading, the longest for 649 ms. During a long task the page ignores taps.

About 496 KiB of JavaScript is downloaded but never used on this page. Google estimates it would make the page about 150 ms faster on a phone.

b-cdn.net costs a phone 399 ms of main-thread work and 650 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.

6 files block the first paint until they finish downloading. Deferring or inlining them could save about 350 ms.

The page has 2,490 HTML elements. Above 1,500, rendering and every interaction get slower on phones.

Web fonts hide text while they load. Setting font-display: swap shows text immediately (about 200 ms).

About 17 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.

Polyfills for old browsers add 24 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.

3 KiB could be saved by minifying JavaScript.

Scripts block taps and scrolling for 3.8 s in total while the page loads. Good is under 200 ms.

The page becomes fully interactive after 22.4 s. Good is under 3.8 s.

Your largest element takes 6.7 s to render on a phone. Google's threshold for “good” is 2.5 s. The largest element is the image “A group of Willamette University students walking outside a…”.

The first text or image appears after 4.1 s on a phone. Good is under 1.8 s.

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' tap response (inp) went from 121 ms to 144 ms at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Visually, the page fills in at 5.0 s (Speed Index). Good is under 3.4 s.

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

Over the last 25 four-week periods to 2026-10-24, real Chrome visitors' largest content (lcp) went from 1.2 s to 1.1 s at the 75th percentile (Chrome UX Report (opens in a new tab) history).

Your homepage downloads 3.2 MB in 88 requests on a phone: scripts 1.6 MB (28), images 982 KiB (16) and HTML 314 KiB (4). Under 2 MB keeps phones on slow connections fast.

2 images are downloaded at several times the size a phone draws them, for example 20260925-wu-p1023080.webp at 1,144 px wide, shown at 368 px. Resized copies would save about 51 KiB.

By the Sustainable Web Design model, a visit to your homepage emits about 0.90 g of CO₂e: 107.9 kg a year at 10,000 visits a month. It scales with page weight, so every byte cut lowers it.

All page content should be contained by landmarks: 4 elements on the page fail this check, rated moderate by axe-core.

ARIA role should be appropriate for the element: 1 element on the page fails this check, rated minor by axe-core.

No Open Graph image (also missing: og:title, og:description), so links shared on LinkedIn, Slack or Facebook show no preview picture.

No favicon is declared in the HTML, so browser tabs and Google's mobile results may show a generic icon.

No twitter:card tag. X falls back to Open Graph, which is incomplete here.

The homepage links to 209 pages on willamette.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.

Your homepage links to 15 pages by a URL that isn't their canonical one, for example https://willamette.edu/request-information/index.html, whose canonical is https://willamette.edu/request-information. 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 85 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=5065847&Ver=2&mid=bea282ef-a93e-4e0d-8e09-d3cd7af6435c&bo=1&sid=cb244fa0d35111f1bf5169c3e48225c4&vid=cb249df0d35111f1af6a1386e85fa316&vids=1&msclkid=N&pi=918639831&lg=.

1 of 5 tappable elements near the top of the page is smaller than 24 px, hard to hit with a thumb.

On a phone, there is no call to action on the first screen: visitors have to scroll to find out what to do next.

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: 5 testimonial or review blocks. Pairing it with named testimonials or customer logos makes it far more convincing.

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 614 words of visible text.

Before a visitor clicks anything, the page loads Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, LinkedIn Insight and Meta Pixel and 2 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 17 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 33 hosts run by other companies (fonts, scripts, analytics, ads), each of which sees the visitor's IP address.