Benchmarking Legislative Branch Websites

In March, ITIF published a report that benchmarked the most popular federal websites using four metrics: page-load speed, mobile friendliness, security, and accessibility. In the report, we looked at nearly 300 federal government websites, including executive, legislative, judicial, and independent agencies. We found that 92 percent of federal websites failed at least one metric. We observed that nonexecutive branch websites seemed to score below executive branch websites, especially when it came to security. We surmised this was happening because websites from legislative, judicial, and independent agencies are not required to follow the same guidance as executive websites and often choose not to.

In the spirit of continuing the discussion about how to improve federal websites, this post further explores this concept by testing legislative branch websites to see how well they scored on each of the report’s metrics.

Methodology

We created a list of legislative branch websites by searching the Internet for the names of the committees, commissions, and agencies identified as being part of the legislative branch in the federal budget. We identified 94 legislative branch websites. We analyze both domains and subdomains (e.g. energycommerce.house.gov). Indeed, we analyzed 47 subdomains for the House of Representatives (house.gov) alone, as the websites on these subdomains appear to be managed independently. We did not analyze the websites of individual members of Congress.

We then repeated the methodology used in the ITIF report to calculate scores and rankings for each legislative website, with minor changes to the security section. For more details, please see the report and this post, which updated the methodology for scoring Domain Name System Security (DNSSEC) implementation.

Results and Discussion

We found that 99 percent of the legislative branch websites failed at least one of the metrics. Only 29 percent of websites had successfully implemented DNSSEC, a security feature which prevents attacks from directing users to malicious websites. In addition, only 34 percent of websites passed the mobile page-load speed test which means these sites are not optimized for a fast user experience on mobile devices. Legislative websites also performed poorly in regards to providing a site that is accessible to people with disabilities with only 52 percent passing this test.

Overall, legislative websites perform worse on these tests than other federal websites. Legislative websites only outperformed its peers on metrics for mobile friendliness and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) implementation. Table 1 below shows how the scores broke down across all 94 websites for each metric compared to the same scores across approximately 300 of the most popular websites from all branches of government. (Please note that the sample of approximately 300 popular websites includes a few legislative branch websites, so the comparison is not perfect):

Table 1: Percent of websites that passed tests for page-load speed, mobile friendliness, security, and accessibility for legislative branch and popular federal websites.

And how did these scores breakdown along partisan lines? We compared 25 Democratic websites, such as the House Minority Leader (democraticleader.gov) and the minority staff website for the House Intelligence Committee (democrats-intelligence.house.gov) with 26 Republican websites, such as the Speaker of the House (speaker.gov) and the House Intelligence Committee (intelligence.house.gov). Republican websites included all major House of Representatives Committee websites, except the House Ethics Committee. We did not include Senate websites in this test because there are not separate majority and minority websites for Senate committees.

Table 2: Percent of legislative websites that passed tests for page-load speed, mobile friendliness, security, and accessibility by party affiliation.

Overall, we found that Democratic and Republican federal websites scored similarly on speed and domain security. However, we found Democratic websites scored lower on average than Republican websites on mobile friendliness and SSL scores. Regarding mobile friendliness, while 88 percent of Republican websites passed this test, only 76 percent of Democratic websites passed. Similarly, while all Republican websites passed the SSL score, only 72 percent of Democratic websites did the same. And Democratic websites scored higher on average for accessibility, with 52 percent of Democratic websites passing compared to 42 percent of Republican sites.

Legislative Websites Should Follow Federal Standards and Best Practices

Many poorly performing federal websites are part of the legislative branch, and thus they are not bound by the same rules and guidelines as executive-branch websites. But that does not mean these websites are less important resources for the public or that users expect a different experience when visiting these sites. Because many individuals and businesses rely on these websites, they should adhere to the same standards as their executive counterparts. To that end, the House Administration Committee and the Senate Rules and Administration Committee should require legislative agency and committee websites to follow the same standards for websites that executive-branch agencies follow. They should also leverage shared services, such as reporting website metrics to the federal data analytics program. Finally, Congress should establish, and participate in, an interagency working group on modernizing websites to share best practices, guidelines, and source code between the various agencies and branches of government.

By leading by example, Congress can send a signal to independent agencies, judicial agencies, and non-compliant executive branch agencies that they need to provide all Americans with secure and convenient access to online government services and information.

Scores

The following table lists the overall score of each legislative branch website.

For a full spreadsheet of the legislative website data, including each website’s score on individual metrics, please visit this Google doc.