Siteimprove’s Digital Certainty Index (DCI) measures the quality and potential impact of a website’s digital presence, including its credibility and trustworthiness, accessibility and usability, and its ability to respond to search engine optimization (SEO) challenges.
How Your DCI Score Is Calculated
Your website’s DCI Score is calculated based on its performance across three categories: Quality Assurance, SEO, and Accessibility. Each category makes up one third (33.33%) of your overall DCI Score. When combined, they give you a comprehensive overview of issues across all three categories, highlighting issues that need to be fixed and providing recommendations on how to fix them.
Quality Assurance – This reflects your website’s credibility and trustworthiness regarding its user-facing characteristics. Your Quality Assurance Score is determined by your website’s performance in four subcategories: Content Quality, Content Freshness, User Experience, and Security.
SEO – This shows how well the user-facing and technical aspects of your site contribute to search engine optimization, and ultimately, higher rankings and organic traffic. Your SEO Score is determined by your website’s performance in four subcategories: Technical, Content, User Experience, and Mobile.
Accessibility – This demonstrates how well your website tests against web accessibility standards set out in WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0. Your website’s Accessibility Score is determined by the number of success criteria your site fulfills under the three WCAG conformance levels (A, AA, AAA).
How to Use Your DCI Score Dashboard
Your website’s DCI Score Dashboard can be found on your Siteimprove Dashboard. The DCI Score Dashboard displays four scores in total, each of which is housed in its own module:
Digital Certainty Index (Your DCI Score) – To see an overview of your DCI Score, click on the DCI overview button in the Digital Certainty Index module. This will take you to a detailed page that gives you a comprehensive overview of issues that need to be fixed across all categories, organized based on the impact they have on your website’s DCI Score. You’ll also see recommendations on how to fix each issue.
Quality Assurance – To see an overview of your Quality Assurance Score, click on the Improve Score button in the Quality Assurance score module. This will take you to a detailed page that’s organized based on the impact each issue has on your website’s Quality Assurance Score. You’ll also see recommendations on how to fix each issue.
SEO – To see an overview of your SEO Score, click on the Improve Score button in the SEO score module. This will take you to a detailed page that’s organized based on the impact each issue has on your website’s SEO Score. You’ll also see recommendations on how to fix each issue.
Accessibility – To see an overview of your Accessibility Score, click on the Improve Score button in the Accessibility score module. This will take you to a detailed page that’s organized based on the impact each issue has on your website’s Accessibility Score. You’ll also see recommendations on how to fix each issue.
Dashboards
Executive
The Executive Dashboard is crafted to give a high-level overview of how the website is performing and key components on the website to pay attention to. There are eight widgets that make up the executive dashboard.
DCI - As mentioned in the above training materials, this measures the quality and potential impact of your website’s digital presence. You can refer back to the Digital Certainty Index section for a more in-depth explanation.
SEO - This is a measure of how well the user-facing and technical aspects of the site contribute to search engine optimization. SEO has an impact on how your site performs in search rankings and the traffic that the site receives. The SEO score is determined by the cumulative score from four sub-categories: technical, content, user experience and mobile.
Accessibility - This is a measure of how well a site meets the standards set out in Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2. The accessibility score is determined by the cumulative score from three areas: progress in resolving errors, progress in resolving warnings and the percentage of pages with low error rate.
Quality Assurance - This is a measure of the credibility and usability of the user-facing aspects of a site. The score is calculated by the combined score of four sub-categories: content quality, content freshness, security and user experience.
Most Popular Pages by Visits - This chart shows the top 10 pages over the last 30 days.
Pages With No Visits - This shows the pages with no traffic over the last 30 days. Identifying these pages can help pinpoint content that is performing poorly. One cause of this could be that the page is too deeply embedded in the website’s page hierarchy.
Traffic Sources - This provides the percentage of total visits from four different traffic sources: direct traffic, search engines, external referrers and social media. Percentage of bounce rate is also shown.
Direct Traffic - This shows the top five sources of direct traffic to the website, including the percentage of total visits. There is an option at the bottom of the widget to show more detail.