Visitors to council websites rightly have high expectations that information will be up-to-date and reliable. Local authorities are also required to adhere to guidelines set out in the Government’s Service Standard, to provide a joined-up experience and great services for users, across all channels. This includes making their website accessible and user friendly, as well as ensuring the efficient delivery of non-digital services including call centres and face-to-face contact.
The data and user research from the online part of the service should be used to improve offline channels, and vice versa – meaning teams are working closer together, often across different departments.
Alongside these challenges, councils have to contend with financial and resource pressures, which can mean departments, including their web management teams, are stretched.
Website reliability, however, is essential to providing a smooth service for citizens, and there are three key metrics that councils and their web teams should be measuring to achieve this.
1. Uptime percentage
Making sure the website is not down is the first issue councils need to avoid. If any part of the platform is not working properly, this can cause user frustration and drive complaints. It is vital for councils to be alerted to downtime problems quickly, so they can be remedied. Council websites should ideally be aiming for a 99.9% uptime percentage, so that services are constantly available to users.
Another risk for councils with site reliability is web development changes that break functionality due to platforms running on legacy code databases. Developers may no longer be working there and, as a result, it is easy for these inherited systems not to work properly if they are not regularly maintained or upgraded. Councils can set up advanced alerts to notify them if elements and pages are broken due to any of these issues. This means the web management team is quickly aware of a problem, rather than waiting for a disgruntled tweet, or call to their customer services team.
2. Core Web Vitals
Google’s set of performance metrics, called ‘Core Web Vitals,’ is an initiative focused on the user experience stages of a web page. These page-ranking metrics are important for councils to monitor, to ensure the loading, interactivity, and visual stability of a website are performing well.
Councils could be failing their users by not passing these metrics. The three sets of data to track are:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures loading performance. This is the amount of time it takes for the largest content element to become visible in the viewport – the area of a web page which can be seen by the user once they request the URL. Typically, on a council website, this is a video, image, or large text element.
First Input Delay (FID): This measures interactivity. This is the time from when a user first interacts with your page to when the browser responds to that interaction. This could be clicking on functions or different pages.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures visual stability. CLS measures the sum total of every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan of the page. This includes ensuring graphics and other visual elements are in the right place – so a user can experience them as intended.
In addition to these factors, councils should monitor The Chrome UX Report, which provides user experience metrics. This data shows how a website is experienced by real users.
By understanding how different demographics, geo-locations, and device types experience a website, this can help councils fix issues in a way that always has their users in mind.
3. Process reliability
Uptime monitoring is only the first step in checking reliability. Council websites are functioning platforms with key processes such as registering to pay council tax, checking bin days, and viewing planning applications. These interfaces can fail for a number of different reasons and need to be monitored regularly.
If third parties are used for any of these functions – such as live chat, analytics, or marketing – it’s vital to check these processes are not causing website performance problems.
Councils often have small teams, which means they don’t usually have a big quality assurance department for manual testing. Having automated synthetic testing is, therefore, a good idea, to check process reliability metrics.
Achieving great service
Councils need to measure website reliability frequently and base this against service standards.
Using a broad, adaptable monitoring suite, combined with actionable website insights on how to reach new regulatory requirements, can help councils provide a great service. By observing these key metrics, councils can improve reliability, user experience and accessibility, which can not only help with both cost and time savings, but reputational damage control too.
Gav Winter is CEO of website monitoring platform, RapidSpike.
