Siteimprove determines your site’s QA scores by its performance in four categories:
Factor #1 – User Experience
What is user experience? How a user interacts with and experiences your website. It includes a person’s perception of utility, ease of use and efficiency. Negative user experience can diminish our brand. Therefore, improving user experience should always be a top priority.
Tips to improve user experience:
- Use clear, concise navigation
- Create headlines or page titles that are attractive to users
- Make sure links are clearly visible (longer, descriptive links within text are easier to identify)
- Use buttons for calls to action that stand out
- Use simple language and bulleted lists so users can digest information quickly
- Check for broken links frequently
- Keep image size under 500KB (larger files slow down page load time)
- Use PDF documents sparingly and keep the file size under 1MB (other document types like Word are not universally accessible)
- Make your website accessible for all users
Factor #2 – Content Quality
What is content quality? The editorial quality of a site’s content, which affects how quickly and accurately users are able to comprehend it.
Tips to improve your website’s content quality:
- Use your monthly QA report from Siteimprove as a guide to finding misspelled and potentially misspelled words
- Use the “Check Spelling” feature in AEM’s Rich Text component
- Have someone else proofread for fewer misspelled words and errors
- Structure your page using meaningful headings for each new section
- Make content easy to scan, short and to the point
- Pay special attention to the homepage and other frequently visited pages
- How to write quality web content
Factor #3 – Content Freshness
What is content freshness? How up-to-date a site’s content is, which affects user retention and engagement. It also impacts a site’s rankings with search engines.
Tips to improve content freshness:
- Regularly add new pages and/or remove out-of-date information
- Keep documents and media files updated
- Add your events to the CAES and/or UGA Extension calendar
Factor #4 – Security
What is security? How vigilant a site has been in only linking to safe domains and in keeping users’ personal information private.
Tips to improve security:
- Never include personal IDs (i.e. social security numbers) on your website
- Do not link to any unsafe domains (external links to websites that could contain phishing, malware, or unwanted software)
