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Benchmark · Private higher education · November 2026

We tested 21 private colleges on mobile. One passed.

Private colleges in South Africa advertise hard online. We looked at how their websites perform for real visitors on phones, which is where those ads send people.

The short version

20 of 21

Fail Google's mobile tests

Core Web Vitals, measured on real phones.

454ms

Typical delay after a tap

The median. Google's limit is 200 milliseconds.

12 of 21

Advertise on four or more platforms

All but one run at least one ad platform.

The sector spends heavily to win a click, then makes the visitor wait. Every site that failed, failed on the same thing: how slowly the page reacts when someone taps it.

How long a tap takes

Each bar is one college. It shows how long the site takes to respond when a visitor taps a button or a menu, at the 75th percentile of real visits on phones. The line marks Google's 200ms limit. Colleges are not named here.

  • College 01161ms
  • College 02249ms
  • College 03258ms
  • College 04310ms
  • College 05324ms
  • College 06349ms
  • College 07365ms
  • College 08393ms
  • College 09397ms
  • College 10415ms
  • College 11454ms
  • College 12463ms
  • College 13471ms
  • College 14473ms
  • College 15480ms
  • College 16484ms
  • College 17505ms
  • College 18588ms
  • College 19695ms
  • College 20787ms
  • College 212,044ms (off the scale)

Scale runs to 800ms. Lower is better.

What we found

  1. Slow to respond is the sector's problemAll 20 failing sites fail on response time, and 12 take more than twice the limit. This is usually caused by too much script running on the page: ad tags, chat widgets, tracking and page builders all compete for the phone's attention.
  2. Most are also slow to load16 of the 21 take longer than 2.5 seconds to show their main content. The typical site takes 3.3 seconds. Three take more than 5.
  3. The more platforms, the more tagsTwelve colleges run ads on four or more platforms at once. Each platform adds its own tracking script to every page, including the pages the ads point to.
  4. Passing is possibleOne college passes all three tests, with a 2.3 second load and a 161ms response. It advertises too. Fast and well-tracked are not opposites.

What a college can do

  1. 01Check your own numbersGoogle publishes them free. Search for PageSpeed Insights, enter your address and read the "real users" section for mobile.
  2. 02Audit your tagsList every ad and tracking script on the site. Remove the ones for platforms you no longer use, and load the rest after the page is usable.
  3. 03Fix the landing pages firstYou don't need a new website. Start with the handful of pages your ads point to, because those are the visits you pay for.

How we measured

Speed figures come from Google's Chrome UX Report: real Chrome users on phones, 75th percentile, across each college's whole site, for the 28 days to mid-November 2026. A site fails if its main content takes longer than 2.5 seconds to appear, it takes longer than 200ms to respond, or its layout shifts more than Google allows.

Ad platforms were identified from the tracking tags on each home page. The 21 are private colleges, business schools and distance-learning providers that appeared in our searches and had enough traffic for Google to report on. It is a sample, not a census, and it says nothing about the quality of the teaching.