29 May 2018
London, 29th May 2018 – The Pensions Advisory Service has been identified as a leader in digital governance in the UK central government sector, after coming in first place in its field in the latest Sitemorse quarterly INDEX.
The Sitemorse INDEX reviews sites, scoring and ranking them based on optimisation, experience, compliance and factors such as loading speed and accessibility.
The Pensions Advisory Service (TPAS) came in first place with an overall score of 7.7 out of 10, representing a high standard of optimization, user experience and content delivery. TPAS took first place for email and came near the top of the list for HTML, performance and metadata. However, it also scored 0 out of 10 for brand, indicating that there are improvements that could be made which would allow the organization to further secure its leading placement.
The Imperial War Museum was the highest riser in the INDEX, boosting its score from 3.64 to 5.22 and climbing 105 places, having notably boosted the standard of accessibility and HTML.
Also in the top five were:
2. The Northern Ireland Executive – scoring 7.5 (increasing by 3.1 from 89th place)
3. Boundary Commission for Northern Ireland – scoring 7.4 (increasing by 2.5 from 55th place)
4. GOV.UK – scoring 7.0 (increasing by 2.1 from 54th place)
5. Natural Resources Wales – scoring 7.0 (increasing by 1.5 from 25th place)
Meanwhile, Department for Economy NI, Northern Ireland Courts and Tribunals Service, Department of Health NI and Department for Infrastructure NI all entered the top 10, having previously been placed 64th, 30th, 40th and 60th respectively.
Overall, the sector has significant room for improvement. Only 7 sites (of 205) had an overall score of 7 or above, while only 6 scored 7 or above for accessibility.
Issues found on low performing sites included broken links, missing images, faulty email addresses and webpages that lacked titles and descriptions. Many organisations appear to be unaware of the issues that are discovered and many more struggle with the substantial challenge of manually monitoring and implementing repairs.
Lawrence Shaw, CEO of Sitemorse (www.Sitemorse.com), said, “Delivering a high standard of digital governance is critically important for central government – and particularly with the EU Directive coming later this year. We’ve made it our mission to help organizations to improve compliance and accessibility – bypassing endless reporting to make major changes fast. The Pensions Advisory Service obviously take this very seriously, and it’s great to see a number of sites that demonstrate significant improvements entering the top ten.”
The results of the INDEX were based on a total of over 115m tests on public pages carried out in April 2018. Every page on every site surveyed was subjected to over 1,600 unique tests, checks and measures each.
Other sectors covered by a Sitemorse INDEX include UK police forces, UK local government, UK higher education, US airlines and consumer finance.
The Sitemorse INDEX report is carried out by Sitemorse, which helps clients to continuously and automatically monitor for issues relating to optimisation, experience and compliance (including SEO and accessibility) on public and private pages. The findings of the latest report, for Q2 2018, will be released over the course of May 2018. The full results for UK central government can be found here: https://sitemorse.com/index/report.html?rt=1412&key=c88c7a18
About the Sitemorse INDEX
Since 2002, the Sitemorse INDEX has provided an independent industry standard for benchmarking digital governance. Sites are reviewed and scored based on some 1,600 tests, checks and measures per page, identifying actions that improve optimisation, experience and compliance. Since its inception, it has been the fundamental measure of digital capability for organisations that strive for online excellence.
Scoring highly typically reflects those that have strong digital leadership and understand the importance of providing the best visitor experience possible – and it reflects positively on the entire organisation’s operations and branding.
The latest results follow over 115m tests on public pages carried out in April 2018. These results provide extensive insights into the experience that these sites deliver and offer vital information on how they can better meet audience expectations – points that are crucial, but impractical to capture manually. Indeed, organisations are all too often unaware of what might be simple actions that they could take that would offer immediate improvements to their delivery.
About Sitemorse
Sitemorse (www.Sitemorse.com) helps organizations to efficiently drive improved user experience, ensuring that content is always optimised and that compliance requirements are always met. With clients in every corner of the world, Sitemorse (www.Sitemorse.com) sets out to remove endless reporting from Digital Governance and to instead provide actionable insights so that major changes can be made quickly.
The company has now been moving the field of Digital Governance forwards for over 15 years, while remaining privately owned, and continues to provide clients with new tools and capabilities every year. Most recently, this has included a focus on extending capabilities directly within the CMS, as well as addressing the governance / QA service issue of ‘endless reporting’.
Sitemorse (www.Sitemorse.com) helps digital managers to build strong processes and accountability, to minimise risks and to achieve the highest standards of content quality. And with Sitemorse (www.Sitemorse.com), there is no need for the substantial infrastructure, support and accordant costs that are required for manual quality and compliance checks.