The value of a website for a Fortune 500 company can be measured entirely by the profits generated through sales or by the savings from customer support delivered online. Commercial companies can use tools like Google's PageSpeed Insights to evaluate whether their site can easily be improved. Note that this is not the only site which verifies that the website was built using best practices.
You may examine any site by first going to https://pagespeed.web.dev/ and then entering the URL of the site you wish to test. If I enter www.arkansas.gov, it gives me a report:
The PageSpeed Insights are designed to be easy to understand by a layman; no special expertise is required.
www.arkansas.gov
The www subdomain was redirected to the portal subdomain,
- The score on Best Practices were 100%. No security issues.
- The SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) score was 92% due to the news feed not having meta descriptions for its links. Still, this is quite good.
- The Accessibility Score was 92%, which is good, but there is room for improvement, and the report suggests precisely what needs to be fixed.
- The Performance Score is 51%. For my students, a 70% score is passing, and at the end of the semester, they all achieved scores from 92-99%. Speed is important because of what I call the 9-second insanity rule: if a user clicks a button and nothing happens for 9-seconds, they go insane and start pressing random buttons or cancel the process. According to Google research, mobile users start cancelling loads at 3 seconds and rarely wait till 9-seconds. This site on 4G in a rural area is more than 10 seconds. Fail.
The biggest problem that I can see is that this page is in a state of rapid prototyping, and any minor change can be deployed immediately without delay. The correct procedure is to make and test your changes and then compile the CSS and JS into the site and page packets before deployment. The person who deployed this page skipped the final step. So when you view the site on a mobile phone, you are waiting for all the CSS and JS to load from a plethora of files, including the CSS and JS that are not being used, so this site is wasting our time and our bandwidth. This final step is one that I have automated on my sites. When the source code has been pushed to be published, the entire process is completed in less than 6 minutes, so for me, this is just part of my workflow.
humanservices.arkansas.gov/
- Best Practices 96%, the site is broken.
- Accessability 95%
- SEO 92%
- Performance 34%
WordPress is often avoided due to high maintenance requirements, significant security vulnerabilities stemming from popular plugins, and slow performance caused by code bloat. It frequently requires constant updates, specialised hosting, and faces scaling limitations for complex, high-traffic, or custom sites.
Here in the USA, WordPress has nearly a 60% market share among small businesses. Practically none of that market share is with Fortune 100 companies that are targeting users on mobile phones. More than half of all web traffic is on mobile platforms. It can be difficult to get WordPress performance over 50% and almost impossible to get over 72%. ArDHS having a score of 34% is just embarrassing.
www.tylertech.com
This is the company that helped build the ArDHS website. They won an award for their very pretty design of ArDHS, and yet the performance is so bad that it is useless for more than half of all Arkansas citizens. How did they do when building their own site?
With a Performance of 22% and a Best Practices of 73%, it seems that their company website is also a train wreck.
Considering that for four years the ArDHS site was completely broken, having a pretty desktop version is an improvement. If someone claims to be qualified as a web developer, just run PageSpeed Insights on their web pages to see if you really want to hire them.
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