Website Fit Score 360°

This category evaluates how usable and friendly your website is to visitors. We measure the score using the following metrics:

Responsivity and Mobile Readiness - The standard for websites nowadays is that they must be usable on both desktop and mobile devices without compromising quality, features, or content. A website with a poor experience for smaller screens guarantees that users click away from your site.

User Centricity - User-centricity means putting users' needs at the center when determining which public services should be provided and how they should be delivered. Your website can be as flashy and inspiring as possible, but users will click away if their needs and desires aren't being addressed.

Structure and Navigation - Having a clear hierarchy of information throughout your website is vital for users to successfully use it—this includes your menu, call to action elements, contact pages, and header and footer. If your site lacks clarity on any of these items, users will become confused and frustrated and will ultimately navigate away from your site.

Rich Content - Rich content consists of different media formats in the same place—whether that be text, images, forms, etc. The key to a successful website is having clear, relevant and keyword-rich content that delivers the right message with power and conviction. The content on your website should target your audience, engage them and persuade them to take action.

Usability - Usability here refers to your site's ease-of-use. Visitors to your website should be able to comfortably read and absorb your content without anything disrupting their experience.

Design Consistency - Your website's design should have consistent interactive elements, coloring scheme, and functionalities across all pages. Without this cohesiveness, your site looks busy or confusing, which makes your site or service seem unprofessional or unreliable.

Desirability and Look & Feel - Look and feel describes how a website appears to a user and what kinds of emotional responses it elicits in them. It's important that the look and feel of your site matches the message you're trying to send or the point you're trying to make, as it adds to your credibility on the web.

Personalization - Personalization here is defined as whether your website has features to adjust content according to their needs or to get results based on their preferences.

This category evaluates how effectively your website adheres to standards that make the web accessible to all users. We measure the score using the following metrics:

Accessible Navigation - Navigation is the way users find and traverse different pages across your site and is often the first thing new users consult when landing on your page for the first time. Keeping it accessible ensures everyone can read and use your site, and you can dramatically improve the navigation experience for users of assistive technologies.

ARIA Semantics - The aria-label attribute is used to define and label an element on your site. Use it in cases where a text label is not visible on the screen so that screen readers can still access it and also know its purpose.

Names and Labels - Naming elements accurately and accessibly will ensure all users know what certain elements of your site do.

When a button doesn't have an accessible name, screen readers and other assistive technologies announce it as button, which provides no information to users about what the button does.

Color Contrast Ratio - Color contrast ratios measure the difference in brightness between text and background color. Text that has a low contrast ratio can be difficult to read, which can reduce reading comprehension and slow down reading speed.

While this issue is particularly challenging for people with low vision, low-contrast text can negatively affect the reading experience for all your users. For example, if you've ever read something on your mobile device outside, you've probably experienced the need for text with sufficient contrast.

Tables and Lists - Tables and lists are organized in a visual way that may not be comprehensible by people using your site with assistive technologies. The may need to be modified to remain as accessible as possible so that these technologies don't output confusing or inaccurate information.

Video Captions - Captions make video elements usable for deaf or hearing-impaired users, providing critical information such as who is talking, what they're saying, and other non-speech information.

Internationalization and Localization - Internationalization and localization are important factors in providing an optimal screen reading experience.

To ensure correct pronunciation, screen readers use a different sound library for each language they support. Screen readers can switch between these language libraries easily, but only if a web page specifies which language to read for a given piece of content.

If a page doesn't specify a language for the <html> element, a screen reader assumes the page is in the default language that the user chose when setting up the screen reader, often making it impossible to understand the content.

This category evaluates how well your website responds to user interaction. We measure the score using the following metrics:

Page Speed - How long it takes the browser to load and render the page, and how quickly users can interact with the page. Poor page speeds frustrate users and may cause them to navigate away from your site before it even finishes loading.

Minification of Files - Minifying is the process of reducing the size and payload of your code files. Minifying includes removing code comments, white spaces, and redundant code in CSS and JavaScript files.

The smaller these files are, the faster they are downloaded, resulting in a quicker execution by the browser. In some cases, it also makes the code more efficient by using shorter variable and function names.

This process can optimize your page performance by reducing the payload of these files.

Asset Optimization - Optimizing your assets involves strategies for keeping file sizes down, ensuring your assets are in the most easily digestible formats for the browser to parse, delaying the loading of images that aren't in the viewport until they are needed, and loading the appropriately sized image for the user's device. This not only ensures the visual content of your site loads faster and takes up less bandwidth or cellular data, but also improves your visitors' overall experiences using the site.

Third-party Integration - A third-party integration is defined as any script hosted on a domain different from the current URL's, so even if you serve assets from an alternative domain that you manage yourself, such as cdn.mysite.com, it will still be treated as a third party.

Establishing early connections to these third-party origins by using a resource hint can help reduce the time delay usually associated with these requests.

DOM Size - DOM size refers to how many DOM nodes, or HTML tags, your page has, or how complex your HTML structure is. An excessive DOM size means that there are too many DOM nodes on your page or that these HTML tags are 'nested' too deep.

While loading the page with an excessive amount of DOM nodes, a browser will often need more computing power to 'render' the page, and this usually causes a delay in page rendering.

Font Loading - Fonts are often large files that take a while to load. When the browser is loading the page, the text content may be ready before the web fonts have been fully downloaded. In these situations, the text remains invisible or hidden from the user for a brief period until your web font has been downloaded. This issue is known as the Flash of Invisible Text (FOIT).

Ensuring that the web font loads remain visible helps prevent blank pages and unnecessary layout shifts for a better page experience.

This category evaluates how well search engines would rank your website. We measure the score using the following metrics:

Content Meta Information - Your website meta information or metadata consists of a page title and meta description for every page. This provides search engines like Google with important information about the content and purpose of each individual page on your website and helps determine whether your website is relevant enough to display in search results.

Hyperlink texts should clearly convey their targets, so that both users and search engines can understand their meaning. Valid canonical and hreflang link tags tell search engines which version of a page to crawl and the URLs for all language versions of a page.

Descriptive and Alternate Texts - Descriptive link text, clearly conveying a link's target, helps both users and search engines understand your content and how it relates to other pages.

Informative images should aim for short, descriptive alternate text.

Crawling Friendliness - Search engines examine your website to display it properly in search results. If your website is set up in a way that confuses the search engines, your content will appear less often in search results, and fewer people will visit your page.

Make sure all your pages are crawlable, are served with successful HTTP status codes, and the website provides the right instructions for crawling robots.

Mobile Meta Information - Many search engines rank pages based on how mobile-friendly they are; that is, whether your site displays well on mobile devices. In an increasingly mobile world, it's important to make sure users of any device can access and use your site comfortably.

Setting the viewport meta tag lets you control the width and scaling of the viewport so that it's sized correctly on all devices. Font sizes smaller than 12px are often difficult to read on mobile devices. Tap targets, like buttons and links, should be large enough and far enough apart from each other to make your page mobile-friendly.

Avoided Plugins - Search engines can't index plugin content, and many devices restrict plugins or don't support them. Using browser plugins, such as Java or Flash, should be avoided.