Have you checked your Web Core Vitals recently?
tl;dr: many higher education landing pages are huge, bloated with background videos and massive images. Should we care about web performance? I took a closer look at the 12 websites recognized by the Webby Awards as the best of 2020 in the Schools and Universities category.
This isn’t new
On May 28, 2020, the Google Webmaster Central Blog published Evaluating page experience for a better web. A few weeks earlier, on May 5, the Chromium Blog published Introducing Web Vitals: essential metrics for a healthy site.
Google has been letting us know the performance matters for a long time. This article from the Webmaster blog, Using site speed in web search ranking, is from 10 years ago. The problem is that websites keep getting larger and Google is trying to tell us that if we improve the performance of our pages, they will reward us. So why don’t we?
In higher education, the website is the face of the university. And for many schools, the chance to put a background video on the homepage seems like a perfect way to showcase their dynamic campus. The challenge is that those videos can weigh down performance.
Of the 12 websites recognized by the Webby Awards as the best of 2020 in the Schools and Universities category, 7 of them have background videos. Note that 3 of the 6 videos do not play on small screens. Sidenote, Widener’s video is about ¾ of the way down the page, which is the first time I have seen a background video used there (this is also one of the 3 that does not play on small screens).
The numbers
I took a closer look at the 12 sites using Google’s Measure tool and Webpagetest and compiled the results.
- Performance scores range from 7 to 66 (out of 100) with an average of 31. Your results may vary. Higher ed homepages change all of the time.
- Requests range from 30 to 160 with an average of 83.
- Page Size ranges from 2.4 MB to 25.6 MB with an average of 8 MB.
- $$$$$ — the cost (based on the cost of data) for every one of the 12 sites according to What Does My Site Cost
For comparison, the fastest sites in Higher Education score considerably better (The Fastest Homepages in Higher Ed, Erik Runyon, December, 2019).
Notre Dame, the fastest site on Erik’s list (and Erik’s employer), has a performance score of 100 in his test and 97 in the test I ran. The site makes only 32 requests and has a data cost of one $.
Obviously, Erik and the team at Notre Dame care about this stuff. And they are not alone, as you can see from the other schools listed in Erik’s post. But they do seem to be in the minority.
The tools
How can you fix your site? Ditch the background video (or at least compress it). Optimize your images. Compress, serve the right image types sizes, lazy load.
And there are all sorts of free tools that will help you with the rest:
- Tools to measure Core Web Vitals
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Lighthouse extension
- Or right click on any site, open the inspect tool, and select the audits tab.
Resources for image optimization from Google Developers Web Fundamentals:
Improved web performance benefits everyone so why aren’t you doing it?
