Coop Online tops the UK Retail 500 for digital governance in the latest Sitemorse INDEX

MAYFAIR, U.K. - May 31, 2018 - PRLog -- Coop Online took first place in the UK Retail 500 in the Sitemorse INDEX, Q2 2018, and has received praise for the standard of its digital governance delivery.

The Sitemorse INDEX reviews sites, scoring and ranking them based on optimisation, experience, compliance and factors such as loading speed and accessibility.

Coop Online topped the table with an overall score of 8.1 out of 10, representing a very high standard of optimisation and content delivery. The site came first for accessibility and near the top of the chart for functionality, HTML, performance, email and metadata. However, its score dropped 0.62 points since Q1 2018, indicating that there is still room for improvement.

Firefox was the top riser in the chart, increasing its score from 2.5 to 4.68 and climbing 224 places, having boosted functionality and the standard of email delivery.

Also in the top five were:

2. Habitat (UK) – scoring 6.9
3. Glasswells – scoring 6.9
4. Savers Health & Beauty – scoring 6.8
5. W Boyes & Co – scoring 6.7

Across the UK Retail 500, large numbers of sites score 0 for functionality and/or accessibility – indicating that there is a significant opportunity for these organisations to improve their digital delivery.

Issues found on low performing sites included broken links, missing images, faulty email addresses and webpages that lacked titles and descriptions. Many organisations appear to be unaware of the issues that are discovered and many more struggle with the substantial challenge of manually monitoring and implementing repairs.

Lawrence Shaw, CEO of Sitemorse (www.Sitemorse.com), said, "To remain competitive in today's market, businesses need to ensure that they are delivering to a high standard online – but it seems that poor performance is common in the UK Retail 500. Strong corporate governance correlates closely with positive financial results but, more than that, there are few things that are more important to business results than providing a positive user experience. At Sitemorse, we work to make this as easy possible, sidestepping endless reporting to provide accessible and actionable recommendations so organizations can make major improvements fast."

The results of the INDEX were based on a total of over 115m tests on public pages carried out in April 2018. Every page on every site surveyed was subjected to over 1,600 unique tests, checks and measures each.

Other sectors covered by a Sitemorse INDEX include UK police forces, UK local government, UK higher education, US airlines and consumer finance.

The Sitemorse INDEX report is carried out by Sitemorse, which helps clients to continuously and automatically monitor for issues relating to optimisation, experience and compliance (including SEO and accessibility) on public and private pages. The findings of the latest report, for Q2 2018, will be released over the course of May 2018. The full results for the UK Retail 500 can be found here: https://sitemorse.com/index/report.html?rt=1424&key=8...

About the Sitemorse INDEX

Since 2002, the Sitemorse INDEX has provided an independent industry standard for benchmarking digital governance. Sites are reviewed and scored based on some 1,600 tests, checks and measures per page, identifying actions that improve optimisation, experience and compliance. Since its inception, it has been the fundamental measure of digital capability for organisations that strive for online excellence.

Scoring highly typically reflects those that have strong digital leadership and understand the importance of providing the best visitor experience possible – and it reflects positively on the entire organisation's operations and branding.

The latest results follow over 115m tests on public pages carried out in April 2018. These results provide extensive insights into the experience that these sites deliver and offer vital information on how they can better meet audience expectations – points that are crucial, but impractical to capture manually. Indeed, organisations are all too often unaware of what might be simple actions that they could take that would offer immediate improvements to their delivery.

About Sitemorse

Sitemorse (www.Sitemorse.com) helps organizations to efficiently drive improved user experience, ensuring that content is always optimised and that compliance requirements are always met. With clients in every corner of the world, Sitemorse (www.Sitemorse.com) sets out to remove endless reporting from Digital Governance and to instead provide actionable insights so that major changes can be made quickly.

The company has now been moving the field of Digital Governance forwards for over 15 years, while remaining privately owned, and continues to provide clients with new tools and capabilities every year. Most recently, this has included a focus on extending capabilities directly within the CMS, as well as addressing the governance / QA service issue of 'endless reporting'.

Sitemorse (www.Sitemorse.com) helps digital managers to build strong processes and accountability, to minimise risks and to achieve the highest standards of content quality. And with Sitemorse (www.Sitemorse.com), there is no need for the substantial infrastructure, support and accordant costs that are required for manual quality and compliance checks.