Icelandair leads the global airline industry for digital governance in the Q2 2018 Sitemorse INDEX

25 Jun 2018

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Icelandair

London, 25th June 2018 – Icelandair is the leader in its industry for digital governance according to the latest quarterly Sitemorse INDEX, in which the airline took first place.

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 Icelandair for coming in first place with a score of 6.8 out of 10, reflecting a reasonable standard of optimisation and content delivery. The site came first for functionality, accessibility, performance and HTML, and near the top of the chart for metadata. The site improved its score by 1.6 and moved past Korean Air and KLM into the lead spot.

Austrian Airlines was the top riser in the table, increasing its score from 1.7 to 3.7 and climbing 43 places. The company made a large improvement on its delivery of metadata, as well as on performance, HTML, brand and accessibility – though functionality remained at 0 out of 10, so there remains a significant opportunity for improvement.

Also in the top five were:

2. Korean Air – scoring 5.3

3. Air India – scoring 4.9

4. KLM – scoring 4.8

5. Uzbekistan Airways – scoring 4.8

Issues discovered on low-performing sites included broken links, missing images, faulty email addresses and webpages that came without titles and descriptions. Many companies are unaware of the issues that are discovered and many more struggle with the substantial challenge of manually monitoring and implementing repairs. Companies that score highly, however, generally have strong leadership and a firm understanding of corporate responsibility.

Despite regulatory requirements, though, Icelandair was one of only three sites on the list to score 6 out of 10 for accessibility – none scored higher and 12 of 56 scored 0 out of 10. This underlines a serious problem in both optimisation and in enforcement. Many companies state that their sites are accessible when, whether they are aware of it or not, it simply is not correct. In today’s climate, it’s critical for airline leaders to get a full understanding of the requirements and to improve accessibility, rapidly, to meet regulatory requirements.

Lawrence Shaw, CEO of Sitemorse, said, “It’s great to see businesses like Icelandair improving their performance but there’s a huge opportunity for the sector as a whole to improve on its delivery. Not only is it a regulatory requirement, but we believe making the changes needed will result in significant financial benefits. What’s more, it doesn’t have to be hard. At Sitemorse, we make digital governance as simple as possible by providing prioritised recommendations, so businesses can make major improvements fast, without having to deal with endless reporting.”

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 Global Airlines (US connecting) can be found here: https://sitemorse.com/index/report.html?rt=1418&key=a8cabfee

 

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.