Working Together to Make GovHub More User-Friendly

We understand that your scores in Siteimprove are sometimes affected by issues that are beyond your control. Our team is working to fix these issues that affect accessibility and SEO, which are often code-related. These fixes will be implemented into future GovHub releases.

What We’re Doing

To keep you informed of what we’re addressing, we have published a list of platform issues in our Knowledge Base. This list will be updated as we work on the issues that impact GovHub as a whole. Here are a few of the identified issues:

Meta Issues

Metadata is used to summarize basic information about data on a page. Sites like Facebook and Google use meta data to populate search results. Meta issues that impact GovHub deal with missing titles, descriptions, and tags. 

Heading Issues

Issues with headings can negatively impact your score in the accessibility module. Visitors who use assistive technology can lose context of your website’s content when heading tags are not used properly. If this issue occurs on your agency’s site, it can be fixed by making sure the heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) are in hierarchical order.

Although some instances of heading issues can be fixed as an editor, there are some issues at a platform level that we are researching to determine the appropriate heading levels for embedded content.

What You Can Do

The good news is that there are many issues that you as a content manager do have control over. These issues related to your site’s content can be fixed using Editor permissions in GovHub.

Low text-to-code ratio

Pages with a low text-to-code ratio can negatively impact your score in the SEO module. Search engines like Google will crawl and rank your web page based on the quality of its content. Having enough original written content in the body of the page to support your topic is an important factor. If this issue occurs on your agency’s site, consider the page that is affected. If one of your webpages has a low text-to-code ratio, you can either combine the content with another related page or expand the content to give it more relevance, context, and explanation.

Speed

Speed related issues can negatively impact your score in the SEO module. This is a common issue across GovHub sites that content managers can address on their own. One cause of low speed is the large-sized files on your agency’s site. Large images and .png files slow your site’s loading speed. Make sure that your images are optimized for the web and in .jpeg format.

Navigation depth

Navigation related issues can negatively impact your score in the SEO module. The navigation depth refers to the number of clicks that it takes for a visitor to reach a page from the homepage. The more clicks that it takes to access a page, the harder that the page is for visitors to find and search engines to index. A general rule is to avoid having a navigation depth beyond 5 clicks. To simplify the user journey, consider improving the hierarchy, organization, and labeling of each section of your site.

What’s next?

There are many resources available to you as you work on the issues affecting your site. 

• Visit our GovHub Analytics Knowledge Base for more information on the basics of Siteimprove.
• Visit Siteimprove’s Help Center for getting started guides, FAQs, and the Siteimprove Academy.
• Open a ticket with our Support Desk if you encounter an issue that you are unsure about.

Related to: 

• Analytics
• GovHub