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  • Regularly add new pages and/or remove out-of-date information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)