Central Government website rankings

Top of the league and best site overall was The Child Support Agency (www.csa.gov.uk). At the bottom of the table, representing the poorest site overall for the third month running, was The Department of Trade and Industry.

Website Function
No site was error free this month and 9 sites had 10 errors or less. The site with the highest number of error occurrences was again The Office of Fair Trading (www.oft.gov.uk) with 5,076.

Website Compliance
Accessibility ñ 19 sites scored 100% and 49 sites scored 80% on the automated tests, looking at the requirements of Priority 1 (A) accessibility. 6 sites had less than 1% compliance when tested against the mandatory requirements for Priority 1 accessibility. The Home Office site showing great improvements this month, up to nearly 90% A compliance.

HTML ñ The site with the lowest number of warnings [HTML standards compliance within the requirements laid down by W3C and IETF] was eGIF AAccreditation (www.egifaccreditation.org) with 3. HM Customs and Excise (www.hmce.gov.uk) had the poorest HTML, with nearly 40,000 failures.

Website Performance
35 sites passed all basic speed tests, looking at first page download and simulated as being viewed by users with home [56k] and ADSL [512k] access.

The site with the fastest response time was Local eGOV (www.localegov.gov.uk); The Rail Regulators (www.rail-reg.gov.uk) had the slowest response time, and was 375 times slower than Local eGOV.
The site with the fastest download speed was Export Credits Guarantee Department (www.ecgd.gov.uk); Scotland (www.scotland.gov.uk) had the slowest download speed and was 80 times slower than Export Credits Guarantee Department.