Additional Considerations: WCAG Compliance and Downtime

WCAG Compliance

What it is

The Website Content and Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are a series of guidelines developed by the World Wide Web consortium (W3) to provide compliance standards for accessibility on the web. These guidelines touch on both technical implementation as well as more qualitative or general guidelines for ensuring differently abled web users and the supporting technologies are able to successfully parse content and support website navigation.

WCAG is in its second major iteration (WCAG 2.0) and provides a three tiered structure (A – lowest, AA, and AAA – highest) of accessibility compliance.

Why it matters

We consider WCAG compliance of AA or AAA levels to be a best practice in web development and encourage all development teams and organizations more generally to become conversant in them and work to implement them in their projects.

Understanding and working to be compliant with WCAG standards helps to ensure your website (and by extension your organization) is inclusive of diverse audiences.

What to do

• For existing sites, tools and services are available for development teams to audit a site and develop action lists for improvement.
• For new sites, development teams can familiarize themselves with and be sure to implement WCAG standards from the start of a project.

We’ve worked with JB Analytics for a year on growth marketing projects. Their work on analytics, SEO, copywriting, and conversion rate optimization increased our sales-qualified lead volume and has been unambiguously ROI positive.

Dan Croak, CMO of thoughtbot a premier software consultancy

Downtime

What it is

The time your site spends unreachable by users due to technical issues (e.g. server crash).

Why it matters

While no one thinks having your site down is good, it’s often underappreciated just how bad it can be for SEO. Downtime is a serious negative quality signal for search engines. As a business they specialize in sending users to high-value content. If your site is down, this represents a significant loss to their credibility and value for their customers. Downtime matters more than you might think!

What to do

• We always recommend implementing a monitoring service like Uptime Robot to ensure your team receives notifications of any downtime.
• Leverage  excellent, trusted external hosting solutions like WPEngine where possible, as opposed to trying to manage your own server .