London, 14^th June 2018 – Cater Allen Private Bank is the leader in digital governance in UK Consumer Finance and has once again taken first place in the field in the latest Sitemorse quarterly INDEX.

The Sitemorse INDEX reviews sites, scoring and ranking them based on optimisation, experience, compliance and technical factors such as loading speed and accessibility.

Congratulations go to Cater Allen for leading the table with an overall score of 8.2 out of 10, reflecting a high standard of optimisation and content delivery. The site came first for functionality, performance and metadata, and near the top of the chart for HTML. However, it only scored 3 out of 10 for accessibility, showing that there remains room for improvement.

Cash Converters was the chart’s top riser, increasing its score from 3.4 to 5.5 and climbing 99 places. The company increased its website performance from 9 to 10 out of 10 and significantly improved functionality.

 

Also in the top five were:

2. GCA Altium Priorities – scoring 7.8

3. John Charcol – scoring 7.6

4. JCB Card Europe – scoring 7.2

5. Chelsea Building Society – scoring 7.2

However, only 6 sites of the 183 tested in the UK Consumer Finance sector scored above 6 out of 10 for accessibility, while many scored 0 for functionality – proving that there are significant opportunities for the industry to improve the standard of its digital delivery. Indeed, many companies will report that there are sites are accessible when, whether they know it or not, this simply isn’t true. Given an increased focus on digital accessibility, both in legislation and litigation, it’s important for executive boards to ask exactly what is going and to demand improvement.

Lawrence Shaw, CEO of Sitemorse (www.Sitemorse.com), said, “Quality of digital delivery is imperative for consumer finance – and it’s a field where compliance and accessibility can’t just be box ticking exercises but have to be built in from the foundation. It’s great to see businesses like Cater Allen achieving strong results but the sector as a whole could likely achieve significant benefits from providing improved digital functionality and accessibility. At Sitemorse, we make it our job to make this as easy as possible by providing prioritised recommendations so businesses can make major improvements fast.”

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. These include searching for broken links; running WCAG 2.0 accessibility checks; testing HTML code; gauging site performance; reviewing whether titles are set for web pages and PDFs; and checking that emails are correctly formed.

Other sectors covered by a Sitemorse INDEX include the UK Retail 500, UK police forces, UK local government, UK higher education and the life sciences sector.

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 and June 2018. The full results for UK Consumer Finance can be found here: https://sitemorse.com/index/report.html?rt=1422&key=b61baa68

 

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.

Sitemorse carried out over 115m tests on public pages in April 2018 in order to build the INDEX. 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.