2023 State of European Higher Education Websites

In Europe, 24% of the population lives with some form of disability. Many of them depend on digital accessibility. Your website should be accessible to everyone, regardless of age, level of digital competency, or disability. This is especially important for students, employees, and their families.

We advise achieving an accessibility compliance score of at least 70% for organizations using the Monsido platform in order to demonstrate progress towards compliance.

The average accessibility score for the report was 70.61%, just above our recommended threshold.

The following 5 Universities scored highest for digital accessibility in 2023.

Monsido’s Content Quality Assurance module looks for misspellings, broken links, broken images, and readability issues. By working on quality assurance, you can decrease bounce rates, increase conversions, and improve your SEO, helping (future) students more easily find the information they need about their university or education program.

The benchmark average for quality assurance in this report was just 57.1%.

However, the university websites listed below deserve credit for making an outstanding effort to raise the bar for content quality assurance.

On-page SEO continues to have a crucial impact on search engine rankings. Neglecting essential elements such as H1 tags, broken links, and excessive internal links can negatively affect both your rankings and the overall experience of your visitors.

The average SEO score was 81.04.

We praise the following universities for taking leadership positions in the SEO category:

Ensuring a fast-loading website is essential for SEO, as it is a ranking factor utilized by Google, and enhances user experience. With the help of Monsido's Heartbeat module, you can monitor your website's performance, ensuring a positive user experience and averting any potential visitor frustration.

The European higher education websites in this report had an average response time of 339.1 ms. Your score must be under 200 ms for you to be considered an excellent performer.

The following top five European high education institutions can be proud of their exceptional response time results, however:

Assessing the overall website performance score (ranging from 0 to 100) using Google LightHouse and Core Web Vitals offers a comprehensive understanding of how factors such as visitor location, network speed, and device impact your site's performance. It provides valuable insights into the overall performance of your website.

The average desktop performance rating for this benchmark report was just 52.09. At Monsido we suggest you aim for a score between 90 and 100.

Below is a list of the top five European higher education websites, based on their desktop performance score in this report.

We looked at 105 European higher education websites in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands for 2.5 weeks at the end of May 2023.

If you can’t find your university name and are curious about what your website score will look like – scan your website here.

Are you on the list, and would you like to receive your in-depth results on all parts of your website?

Let's get in touch and discuss your results.

See your website's scan results and how your university performed in this report.

We can also scan your internal user portal if you need to understand its performance.

Monsido:

• Scanned a sample of 500 pages from the main publicly facing websites of 105 European higher education websites in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, and Switzerland using Monsido’s Web Governance software during a two-week period in May 2023.
• Ranked the 105 European higher education websites based on their scores in web accessibility, content quality assurance, SEO, and response time.
• Calculated the overall champions based on the average (weighted) ranking in all categories, prioritizing web accessibility, then content quality assurance, response time, SEO, and performance.