What 988 higher ed websites reveal about digital maturity

Siteimprove has just launched its new higher ed benchmark and interactive data report, built from performance data across 988 websites.

The experience gives higher ed teams a new way to explore how institutions compare across digital certainty, quality assurance (QA), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and accessibility, and to see where performance is strongest, where it breaks down, and how site size affects results.

Key takeaway: Higher ed websites have a strong digital foundation, but few have reached operational maturity. Institutions cluster in the middle: QA lags, mobile SEO is weak, and accessibility suffers as website size grows.

Look past the headline score

The benchmark is based on Siteimprove’s (DCI), which measures overall website performance based on three equally weighted pillars: QA, SEO, and accessibility. QA covers site reliability and content accuracy, SEO tracks how well users and search engines can discover content, and accessibility assesses how easily all users, including those with disabilities, can navigate and use the site.

This matters because it changes how the data should be interpreted.

“What is the average DCI score?” isn’t the question to ask. The most useful one is, “Which pillar is lifting performance, which one is holding it back, and what do the sub-scores reveal about why?”

Most institutions have a workable digital foundation, but few have achieved maturity across all three pillars.

Most institutions cluster in the middle

The first pattern in the data is that most institutions sit in the middle of the benchmark rather than at either extreme.

This shows the sector is neither broadly underperforming nor consistently excelling. Most have handled the basics, but fewer have built the governance, workflows, and technical discipline needed for strong performance across all website quality dimensions.

In other words, higher ed isn’t starting from scratch. But it’s not finished either.

QA is the weakest of the three core pillars

Among the three main benchmark pillars, QA is the weakest.

This is significant because QA reflects the day-to-day reality of maintaining a trustworthy, usable digital experience. It captures signals tied to content quality, freshness, user experience, and security. When QA lags, it usually points to an operational issue rather than a technical one.

This is one of the clearest indicators in the benchmark that many institutions are better at building a visible website than they are at sustaining a well-governed one.

The biggest drag is the user experience inside QA

If one sub-score best captures the maturity gap, it is the QA User Experience sub-score.

Its median score sits around 49, making it the weakest clear sub-score in the benchmark. That means more than half of the institutions fall below 50.

This matters because user experience problems often manifest as hidden friction: issues that do not always dominate a headline score but still degrade trust, usability, and consistency across the site. Broken journeys, stale elements, and accumulated experience issues are often symptoms of broader governance strain.

This makes QA User Experience more than a weak metric. It’s a sign that digital operations are beginning to break down.

SEO is strong overall, but mobile is the weak flank

SEO is the strongest core pillar in the benchmark, which suggests many institutions have established a solid baseline for search visibility.

But the picture isn’t uniformly strong.

The clearest weakness is mobile. While overall SEO performance remains solid, the median SEO mobile score drops meaningfully below the top-line SEO score.

This indicates that many institutions have adopted foundational SEO practices but have not kept pace with the shift to mobile. Gaps in mobile SEO risk undermining discoverability and user satisfaction on the devices prospective students increasingly use.

Accessibility is respectable on the surface but weaker at deeper levels

Accessibility shows a similar pattern.

At the top level, the sector performs reasonably well. Deeper data shows lower scores at levels A, AA, and AAA, indicating that fewer institutions have embedded accessibility across content, design, and technical operations.

This distinction matters. Meeting the basics isn’t the same as achieving maturity.

Larger websites face a clear complexity tax

One of the strongest patterns in the benchmark is the relationship between site size and performance.

As websites grow, median DCI declines modestly. But accessibility drops much more sharply than the other top-level metrics.

Across page-count quartiles:

• The median DCI decreases from 74 among the smallest sites to 69 among the largest.
• The median accessibility drops from 79 to 67.
• The median SEO remains relatively stable, moving from 81 to 79.
• The median QA stays flat at 62 across quartiles.

This is where the story sharpens.

The issue isn’t that larger websites perform worse across the board. They do not. SEO proves relatively resilient. QA is weak across the sector, but it’s not tied specifically to site size. Accessibility is where complexity imposes the clearest cost.

This suggests that scale makes governance harder, ownership more distributed, and consistency more difficult to maintain, especially in areas that require sustained operational discipline.

What the benchmark says about higher ed digital maturity

The most useful conclusion isn’t that higher ed websites are failing.

Most institutions have achieved baseline digital competence, but few have reached operational maturity.

That maturity gap shows up in familiar ways:

• QA remains the weakest top-level pillar.
• Mobile SEO underperforms the broader SEO category.
• Accessibility declines most as websites scale.

Taken together, these patterns point to a sector that understands the basics but still struggles to maintain consistency across large, complex digital environments.

The benchmark doesn’t just show scores; it reveals where digital maturity begins to fray.

Explore the interactive benchmark

The benchmark report includes an interactive data experience that lets you sort, filter, and compare all 988 higher ed websites across DCI, QA, SEO, accessibility, and the underlying sub-scores.

Use it to:

• Compare institutions across the benchmark.
• See which pillars are strongest or weakest.
• Identify the sub-scores that drag performance down.
• Explore how page count relates to digital performance.

Explore the full higher ed benchmark interactive data report.