A new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has found that approximately 91 percent of most popular U.S. federal websites did not fare well on at least one of the metrics for page-load speed, accessibility, mobile friendliness and security.ITIF said Monday it examined 469 federal websites for the Benchmarking U.S. Government Websites report’s second edition and found that most of the online sites failed to reach industry and government standards for web design and development.
The report showed that 27 percent of federal websites analyzed in the second edition passed the test for mobile page-load speed compared with 36 percent of such sites studied in the initial report released in March.
The foundation also found that 60 percent of the online sites were accessible for people with disabilities and that 61 percent of those sites were considered mobile friendly.
ITIF examined the government websites in terms of security and found that 71 percent of the sites passed the test for Secure Sockets Layer certificates that serve as the foundation for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure connections.
Eighty-eight percent of the analyzed websites were equipped with the Domain Name System Security protocols, the report noted.
The report also suggested several measures lawmakers can implement to help build up federal websites and those include the launch of a modernization sprint to address website problems, introduction of a website consolidation program and a requirement for agencies to report site analytics.
