Measuring the health of a university website means looking beyond pageviews and traffic. A healthy site helps its audiences accomplish what they came to do, supports institutional goals, provides accurate and accessible information, performs well across devices, and can be sustainably maintained by the people responsible for it.
Website health lives across several dimensions, not in a single metric. Here's how you can measure each one so you get a true picture of both the visitor experience and the operational reality behind it.
The most important question is simple: can people accomplish what they came to your website to do? A prospective student might need to find a program, understand admissions requirements, calculate cost, request information, or start an application. Current students, parents, faculty, alumni, and donors each come to your page with their own goals.
Identify the most important tasks for each audience, then measure how well your site supports them. Depending on the task, useful metrics include:
Conversion rates and form completions
Application or inquiry starts
Task completion rates
Engagement with key calls to action
Internal search behavior and common failed searches
Exit points within important user journeys
Traffic alone doesn't tell you whether a page is working. A page with 50,000 visits that doen’t move visitors forward may be less effective than a page with 2,000 visits and a high task-completion rate.
University websites accumulate content fast. Without ongoing maintenance, outdated and low-value pages can linger online for years. Track indicators that reveal where content is decaying:
Pages not updated within an appropriate period
Pages overdue for review or missing a review date
Pages without an assigned content owner
Duplicate or conflicting content
Orphaned pages and broken links
Missing or poor metadata
Pages receiving little or no traffic
Not every old page is unhealthy. A university history page may stay accurate for years and be considered evergreen content, while an admissions deadline can go stale within months. Evaluate content freshness by purpose and risk, not simply by age.
Accessibility deserves to be treated as a core health metric, not a periodic compliance project. Automated testing catches issues like missing alt text, improper heading structures, inaccessible forms, and insufficient color contrast. But automation has limits, so pair it with manual testing and human review.
Track more than the number of issues. Look at their severity, where they occur, how quickly they're resolved, and whether the same problems keep appearing in newly published content.
The ultimate goal is to implement processes to prevent accessibility from being introduced in the first place. When your CMS builds accessibility into templates and structured content, you stop relying on hundreds of contributors to get every decision right.
Even excellent content creates a poor experience if pages are slow, unreliable, or hard to use. Monitor the factors that shape how the site actually performs:
Page load speed
Mobile performance and usability
Broken links and 404 errors
Uptime and availability
Crawlability and indexing
Redirect problems and structured data errors
Focus your attention on your most important pages and journeys. A slow load on an obscure archive page doesn't have the same detrimental impact as one affecting your homepage, program pages, or application experience.
People increasingly encounter university content before they ever reach your website. That makes discoverability, across both traditional search engines and AI-powered answer engines, a genuine measure of health. Track:
Organic search visibility for important topics
Queries bringing visitors to your site and their click-through rates
Indexing and crawl issues
Structured data implementation
Whether key information is presented clearly and consistently
Visibility and accuracy in AI-generated answers
Strong visibility depends on far more than keywords. Clear writing, structured content, authoritative information, consistent terminology, and good governance all make your content easier for both people and machines to understand.
A website can look healthy to visitors while becoming increasingly difficult for the institution to maintain. Governance metrics surface those problems before they show up externally. Consider tracking:
Percentage of important pages with assigned owners
Percentage of pages with review dates, and how many are overdue
Workflow approval and rejection rates
Items stalled in workflows
Time required to publish important updates
Contributor activity and recurring quality issues
Areas of the site without active ownership
These measures answer a question every web team should ask: Can your institution sustainably maintain the website you have? A site that depends on a small central team manually finding and fixing thousands of problems isn't healthy, even if those problems are currently under control.
It's tempting to collapse website health into one number, but a single score hides the differences that matter most. A site can score well on speed while failing prospective students on task completion. Instead, build a health dashboard organized around a small set of dimensions:
Audience effectiveness: Are visitors accomplishing important tasks?
Content health: Is information current, accurate, useful, and owned?
Accessibility: Can people of all abilities use the site successfully?
Technical performance: Is the experience fast, reliable, mobile-friendly, and crawlable?
Discoverability: Can people and machines find and understand your content?
Governance: Can your organization sustainably maintain quality at scale?
Set benchmarks for each area, then investigate meaningful changes rather than chasing a single composite figure.