HIGHER EDUCATION INDUSTRY REPORT
Benchmarking higher ed website performance
Explore how higher education institutions in the US perform across Digital Certainty, Quality Assurance, SEO, and Accessibility using sortable, filterable benchmark data from websites.
Explore {{ totalSitesFormatted }} higher ed websites and
uncover what drives performance
Sort by any metric, compare scores, and see how site size relates to performance
By State
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By Division
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By Conference
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How to read this benchmark
Digital Certainty Index (DCI)
The Digital Certainty Index (DCI) is Siteimprove’s overall benchmark for a website’s digital performance. It combines three equally weighted pillars — Quality Assurance, SEO, and Accessibility — to show the overall strength of a site’s digital presence. A higher score is better.
Accessibility
Accessibility measures how well a website performs against web accessibility standards in WCAG 2.1. The score reflects performance across WCAG conformance levels A, AA, and AAA, along with WAI-ARIA authoring practices and best practices. A higher score is better.
SEO
SEO measures how well a site’s technical setup and user-facing elements support search visibility, rankings, and organic traffic. It is calculated from four sub-scores: Technical, Content, User Experience, and Mobile. A higher score is better.
QA
Quality Assurance measures the credibility and usability of a site’s user-facing experience. It is based on four sub-scores: Content Quality, Content Freshness, User Experience, and Security. A higher score is better.
How to read DCI vs. Benchmark
DCI vs. Benchmark shows how a state’s median DCI compares to the overall benchmark median. Positive values mean the state is above the benchmark, negative values mean it is below. Small differences may reflect rounding.
How Top Challenge is determined
Top Challenge is the lowest of the three core pillar scores for that state: QA, SEO, or Accessibility. It highlights the area most likely to be pulling overall performance down. If all three scores are very close, Top Challenge is labeled as "Mixed".
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DCI Score Distribution
Most institutions cluster in the 70–85 range, with a sizable second group in the 50–70 band. Very few sites score below 50 or above 85, indicating that the sector is generally middling rather than exceptionally strong or severely underperforming.
Which sub-scores drag performance down most?
The weakest areas are concentrated in accessibility and user experience, especially Accessibility AAA, Site User Experience, and Accessibility WAI-ARIA. By contrast, Security and core SEO content factors are stronger, suggesting that overall DCI is being pulled down more by accessibility gaps than by technical hardening.
Size vs. Performance
Performance declines as institution size increases, with the steepest drop appearing in Accessibility. SEO stays relatively strong across all size quartiles, while QA remains consistently lower and flat.
Public vs. Private
Public and private colleges perform very similarly across all four metrics. Public institutions hold a slight edge in DCI, Accessibility, and QA, while SEO is essentially even between the two groups. Overall, institution type appears to have limited impact on benchmark performance.
Higher Education Industry Report FAQs
This benchmark compares higher ed website performance across Digital Certainty, Quality Assurance, SEO, and Accessibility using data from higher-educational websites in America. It is designed to show how institutions compare across key digital performance areas, not to label any one site as simply good or bad.
The Digital Certainty Index (DCI) is the overall benchmark score. It combines three equally weighted pillars — QA, SEO, and Accessibility — to give a high-level view of website performance.
QA reflects credibility, usability, and site hygiene. SEO reflects search readiness across technical, content, user experience, and mobile factors, while Accessibility reflects WCAG-based performance along with ARIA and best practices.
Larger websites are typically harder to govern consistently, which can make issues more difficult to identify and fix over time. That is why the benchmark includes page count and lets users explore how site size relates to performance.
The additional metrics break the headline scores into more specific drivers of performance. These include measures like Content Quality, Content Freshness, User Experience, Security, Technical SEO, Mobile SEO, and Accessibility levels A, AA, and AAA.
No. This benchmark is meant to highlight patterns, strengths, and likely areas for improvement across institutions. A full website audit is still the best way to diagnose the specific issues affecting an individual site.