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NTN Web Presence Modernization — Audit & Proposal

Prepared by That Simple Tech, June 2026.

1. What exists today

NTN's public web presence is split across three properties on three stacks:

Property Stack Role
candidates.nationaltestingnetwork.com React + Vite + MUI SPA on S3/CloudFront Jobs, scheduling, payment, scores
www.nationaltestingnetwork.com/publicsafetyjobs/*.cfm Adobe ColdFusion FAQs, pricing, test info, per-state pages
departments.nationaltestingnetwork.com WordPress Agency marketing

The apex domain 302-redirects to the candidate SPA's hash route (/#/welcome), making the SPA the effective front door.

2. Measured defects (June 2026)

  1. The front door is invisible to search. The SPA serves an 894-byte HTML shell with an empty <div id="root"> — no meta description, no Open Graph tags, no structured data. Everything after the # in hash-based routes is never sent to servers, so crawlers see one blank page.
  2. robots.txt is broken. The CloudFront SPA fallback rewrites /robots.txt to the HTML shell. There is no sitemap.
  3. One 2.1 MB JavaScript bundle (~636 KB gzipped) with no code splitting. Stripe, Cognito/Amplify, reCAPTCHA, MUI, and every route's code load on first paint, on every device.
  4. No content without JavaScript. Screen readers, low-bandwidth users, and link previews all receive an empty page.
  5. Three brands, three navigations. A candidate researching a department bounces between a 2026 React app, ColdFusion pages, and a WordPress site. The organic search traffic NTN does earn lands on the oldest-looking tier (the .cfm pages), which then hands off to the SPA.
  6. Trust friction. Candidates' most common complaints (test cost clarity, score opacity, what-happens-next) are addressable with content and UX, not policy changes.

3. What this demo changes

Defect Fix in this codebase
Hash routing, empty shell Path-based routes, every page server-rendered/prerendered with full HTML, meta, OG tags
Broken robots/sitemap robots.ts + sitemap.ts metadata routes, generated at build
No structured data JSON-LD: Organization, JobPosting per job, Service per exam, FAQPage
Monolithic bundle App Router code splitting; the Amplify/Cognito chunk loads only on /dashboard
Three properties One IA: candidates, exams, pricing, departments, FAQ in a single design system
Score opacity Candidate dashboard with per-section performance bands and concrete next steps (proprietary weights stay server-side in the scoring Lambda)
Pricing opacity Transparent fee table plus a live cost estimator backed by the pricing API

4. Architecture alignment

The backend intentionally mirrors NTN's production environment (Amplify Gen2, AppSync with owner/group authorization, Cognito user pools, TypeScript and Python Lambdas) so the demo doubles as a migration blueprint rather than a throwaway mock. See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md and docs/adr/.

5. Suggested roadmap (post-demo)

  1. Phase 1 — Front door. Ship the SSR marketing/IA layer (this demo) on the apex domain; keep the existing SPA serving authenticated flows.
  2. Phase 2 — Content consolidation. Migrate ColdFusion test/state pages into the new framework (programmatic state × test pages); 301 every .cfm URL.
  3. Phase 3 — Candidate flows. Move scheduling/checkout into the unified app route-by-route, reusing the existing AppSync/Cognito backend.
  4. Phase 4 — Departments. Replace the WordPress portal with the /departments tier and an Agencies-group dashboard.