Performance is non-negotiable

Transcript

I was never a distance runner, but I sure can sprint. This is Higher Ed Hot takes, and I'm Joel Goodman.

Across the globe, universities are facing increased pressure. Enrollment is down, inflation is up. Governments are taking openly hostile actions against higher education, and the ultimate result is that people are losing their jobs due to both staffing reductions and institutional closings.

I personally survived a round of redundancies in 2009 during my first higher ed job. I can still remember the fear, dread, and stress.

I remember colleagues unceremoniously being let go with little regard for their humanity and even less for their years of service. And like everything, this all comes back to money. The lack of it to be more specific.

To be even more specific, this all lands on ego and the misguided thinking that a few lapses here and there don't amount to much. You know, choosing to paint residence halls every other summer rather than give incoming and returning students a clean place to live. Spending hundreds of thousands on a new student information system with no student input on the user experience. Always a successful choice. Right?

And of course, my favorite choosing to ignore your institution's website performance. The lowest of low hanging fruit that costs little to no money and returns immediate value is often ignored for the sake of someone's bad taste.

According to Bravery Media's April, 2025, speedy U benchmarking data. 46% of higher ed websites in the US are operating at 70% or less of their optimal performance. For the UK and Canada, it's 65%. For New Zealand, 64, Ireland, 78%, and for Australia, a whopping 83% of all of their higher ed websites are slow, slow, slow. 70% of their optimal performance.

If you want, you can do some fancy math to figure out how many clicks from display ads you're wasting money on because they get to your site and immediately leave.

But I'll summarize things this way. A Google study showed that 53% - over half- of your mobile visitors will leave your website if it takes three seconds to load. Every 100 milliseconds beyond that can add another 1% onto the number.

To put that in perspective, most schools are leaving millions in potential tuition revenue on the table in order to look cool. Like, forget the table. They're throwing that money on the floor, stepping on it over and over and over again because someone who is not a designer, not a developer, not a marketer, wants a campus drone video on the homepage or a newsfeed or an anthem video, whatever that is.

They're trying and failing to look cool and it's costing your institution. It's costing real money. The people you are trying to engage with a fancy website don't even wait around for it to load. They never even see it.

I've been nice and professional about this for a few years, but we're kind of in critical times now.

Our institutions are failing, closing. We're cutting hundreds of jobs. We're overworking our staff, raising performance expectations while decreasing their resources.

Does a faster website fix this? No. Pro, probably not completely, but a couple mil extra to the bottom line, certainly couldn't hurt.

This is a stewardship issue, and I suppose it's also an educational one, but we have to get our houses in order. Money keeps getting spent and wasted on software and campaigns and ads and new initiatives that are all going to perform below their potential because your website's slow.

That's what's funny. I, I mean, not funny ha ha, but really, you know, funny, sad, it's that we can't see the forest for the trees despite all the information being available to us. We let our industry an important world changing sector wither because we forget that we can ask our audiences how this works.

We accidentally yet actively work to undermine our universities because we're easily distracted by sales pitches and demos and typically not informed enough to make smart decisions. It's a real problem and it seems to be endemic to higher ed globally.

I would be remiss if I acted like this was just about slow websites, but it's also about student experiences, alumni and donor relations, and our communication strategies. No, it's not just slow websites that are the problem, but it is a perfect case study.

So what can you do about it? Well, a whole lot actually, and it doesn't even have to cost you very much.

If you have developers on staff, it could cost you next to nothing, honestly. But after years of tracking and fixing this stuff at Bravery Media, I can pinpoint some common issues to look at. And please, you can reach out to me if you need more specifics. That's what I'm here for.

First off, big videos. Get rid of them and if you're not gonna get rid of them, you need to serve them from a media streaming CDN, with different sizes for different devices.

But no one who matters is actually watching your homepage background video. I'm sorry, they're just not. And if you're going to embed videos from somewhere else, make sure it's not loading duplicate JavaScript for each one. YouTube loves to do that, and it makes your webpage slow.

Here's one, you're not gonna like tracking pixels. Why are you loading Facebook pixels all over your website when nearly zero Gen Alpha kids use meta products? I. Those tracking pixels slow down your website's loading time and actively hurt your conversion rate.

It's ironic that the thing meant to track how performant your paid ads are actually make your paid ads less efficient, huh? Ironic or purposeful. I, but I'll let you be the judge of that.

Attribution is nearly impossible today anyway, so find better, more native ways of gaining insight about your users than loading up your website with third party trackers.

This is the single biggest contributor to double digit load times, and it's costing you applicants and donors.

Next, you need to modernize your code. I won't get too technical, but I still see so many implementations of Bootstrap in higher ed, jQuery in use and content management systems that are outdated and built on web standards from the nineties.

Friends. Your website can look unique and express your brand promise without being gigantic and slow. But the truth is most of our websites look the same anyway. If you want an immediate edge in higher ed marketing performance, make your website blazing fast.

Performance is non-negotiable when it comes to web marketing, but every level from the website up to the paid ads has to commit to that performance. Otherwise, the weakest link brings all the rest down.

Since early 2024, my agency, Bravery Media, has been running speed and accessibility tests on your website every week.

Seriously, we have nearly every institution in the us, Canada, uk, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, tracked on speedyu.com so you can see where you rank among your peer institutions. If you want a deeper dive into your website's performance and specific fixes, let's talk. I can create a checklist for your dev team, or we can help improve your website for you.

But I can't say it enough. This is the single most value packed thing you could do.

It costs so little and returns so much that it's irresponsible not to optimize your website's performance.