Firmdale Hotels leads the hotel industry for digital governance in the Q2 2018 Sitemorse INDEX

MAYFAIR, U.K. - June 26, 2018 - PRLog -- Firmdale Hotels is the leader in its field for digital governance according to the latest quarterly Sitemorse INDEX, in which the hotel chain came in first place.

The Sitemorse hotel industry INDEX reviews 124 hotel sites, scoring and ranking them based on optimisation, experience, compliance and technical factors such as loading speed and accessibility.

Congratulations go to Firmdale Hotels for coming in first place with a score of 6.5 out of 10, reflecting a reasonable standard of optimisation and content delivery. The site also came first for accessibility and near the top of the table for functionality, performance and email.

Aloft Hotels was the top riser in the chart, increasing its score from 2.9 to 5.1 and climbing 94 places. The company made a large improvement in the functionality of its site (repairing issues such as broken links) as well as improving its scores for brand and HTML – though accessibility remained at 0 out of 10, meaning there remains a significant opportunity for further improvement.

Also in the top five were:
2. Hyatt Residence Club – scoring 6.1
3. Hilton Grand Vacations – scoring 5.8
4. Orbis Hotels – scoring 5.6
5. Maybourne Hotel Group – scoring 5.3

Issues discovered on low-performing sites included broken links, missing images, faulty email addresses and webpages that came without titles and descriptions. Many companies are unaware of the issues that are discovered and many more struggle with the substantial challenge of manually monitoring and implementing repairs. Companies that score highly, however, generally have strong leadership and a firm understanding of corporate responsibility.

Firmdale Hotels was the only site on the chart (including 124 brands) to score a 6 or higher for accessibility; five others scored 5, while all others scored less (with many scoring 0). This underlines a real problem in monitoring and management.

Many companies will state that their sites are accessible when, whether they are aware or not, it simply isn't correct. In today's climate, it's critical for business leaders to have a full understanding of the requirements and to demand improvement from their digital teams.

Lawrence Shaw, CEO of Sitemorse, said, "Today's consumers have phenomenal expectations when it comes to digital services: sites have to be fast, functional and easy to use or customers will quickly turn away. Because of that, issues and errors don't just undermine your brand but will cost you a lot of money – and in the current market that can mean seeing your competitive advantage being wiped out entirely. In short, managers have to demand better and demand services that meet the needs and demands of modern consumers. At Sitemorse, we've made it our mission to make digital governance as simple as possible by providing prioritised recommendations, so businesses can make major improvements fast, and without having to deal with endless reporting."

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. These include searching for broken links; running WCAG 2.0 accessibility checks; testing HTML code; gauging site performance; reviewing whether titles are set for web pages and PDFs; and checking that emails are correctly formed.

Other sectors covered by a Sitemorse INDEX include the UK Retail 500, UK police forces, UK local government, UK higher education and the life sciences sector.

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 and June 2018. The full results for the Hotels industry can be found here: https://sitemorse.com/index/report.html?rt=1421&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.

Sitemorse carried out over 115m tests on public pages in April 2018 in order to build the INDEX. 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 organisations to efficiently drive improved user experience, ensuring that content is always optimised and 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.