Parents and teachers hit school sites for calendars, forms, lunch menus, and homework portals. When those pages crawl — especially on a phone in the car park — people bounce and miss updates.
This guide shows how to check a school website for speed and basic SEO in a few minutes, without IT access, then hand the findings to the right person.
What “slow” usually means on school sites
Typical causes:
- Oversized photos from sports day or open evenings
- Embedded PDFs or Google Drive folders on the homepage
- Themes and plugins that load scripts on every page
- No mobile layout check before publish
You do not need to guess. An audit scores the public URL and lists what to fix first.
Steps
- Open the school, PTA, or classroom site in a normal browser tab and copy the homepage URL (or the specific page parents complain about).
- Go to MyWebsiteScore and paste that URL.
- Run the free audit and note the overall score plus the top findings (speed, images, SEO basics, accessibility).
- Screenshot or export the summary and send it to the webmaster, IT lead, or PTA communications volunteer with one ask: “Can we fix these three first?”
Tips for teachers and parent volunteers
- Audit the mobile experience first — that is how most families browse.
- Re-check after big uploads (gallery dumps, prospectus PDFs).
- If the audit flags heavy images, compress them before re-upload rather than shrinking quality in the CMS repeatedly.
When you are ready, run a free audit on MyWebsiteScore and share the score with whoever owns the site.