Methodology

SpeedyU ranks college and university websites based on their performance in Google Lighthouse audits. We use the following metrics:

• Performance
• Accessibility
• Best Practices
• SEO

Our Lighthouse configuration currently only considers results for mobile devices. This is a conscious decision due to mobile device access continuing to increase each month. It is often times the lowest common denominator across location, socio-economic conditions, and generational groups. Incidentally, if your site performs well on mobile devices, it will almost always perform better on desktop-class technology.

Each institution's homepage score is ranked against others in its country, region, and cohort groupings. For instance, U.S.-based community colleges are ranked against each other in one leaderboard, and then against other community colleges in their state and geographic region as separate leaderboards. Rankings are updated weekly.

SpeedyU currently audits homepages. We are considering ways to average scores across critical content pages, so look for that in a future release.

About Lighthouse

Lighthouse is a free, open-source tool created by Google that audits websites for performance, accessibility, best practices, SEO, and more. It provides scores and suggestions to help improve the overall user experience. Here’s how Lighthouse works and interprets the scores:

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that measure the user experience of a website. Lighthouse evaluates three Core Web Vitals:

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures the time it takes for the largest content element (image, text block, etc.) to become visible. A fast LCP helps ensure the page is usable quickly ^{[1] [2]}.

2. First Input Delay (FID): Measures the time between when a user first interacts with the page (click, tap, etc.) and when the browser can respond to that interaction. A low FID ensures smooth user interactions ^[3].

3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures unexpected layout shifts that can cause users to mistakenly tap or click the wrong element on the page. A low CLS minimizes disruptive layout changes ^[3].

Performance Metrics

In addition to Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse measures several other performance metrics:

• First Contentful Paint (FCP): Time until the first text or image is rendered ^[6].
• Speed Index: How quickly content is visually populated ^[4].
• Time to Interactive (TTI): Measures load responsiveness - when a page is fully interactive ^[6].

Lighthouse calculates a Performance score from 0–100 based on a weighted average of these metrics, with higher weights for more important metrics like LCP ^[4].

Other audits

Lighthouse also audits and scores websites on:

• Accessibility: Checks if the site works for users with disabilities or assistive technologies ^{[4] [6]}.
• Best Practices: Validates modern web development best practices ^{[4] [6]}.
• SEO: Evaluates search engine optimization factors like metadata ^[6].

Score interpretation

Lighthouse provides scores from 0-100 for each audit category:

• 0-49 (red) is poor
• 50-89 (orange) needs improvement
• 90-100 (green) is good ^[4]

While a perfect 100 is ideal, Google doesn't expect websites to achieve this. Scores of 90+ are considered good performance ^[4].

Tiebreakers

Occasionally two websites will have the same performance metrics. In that case, several tiebreaking methods come into play. To break ties, we look at:

• Page Weight: We take into account the weight of your HTML, stylesheets, fonts, and images.
• Core Web Vitals: We look at your Core Web Vitals results in relation the overall weight of your page.
• Accessibility: Websites with zero AXE accessibility errors win over sites with errors.

Future Methodology

As best practices for website performance continue to change, Bravery Media reserves the responsibility to update our methodology and ranking practices. Changes to those methods will always be available on this page and documented in our changelog. We want SpeedyU to be a tool that helps colleges and universities improve their conversion rates and grow enrollment.