Australia’s best and worst government websites ranked

A dramatic overhaul of the myGov website – once the laughing stock of the public sector – has resulted in it claiming first spot in a survey of 120 public sector sites across six countries.

The Adobe global survey scored myGov 74.5 out of 100, up by nearly 14 points, after Services Australia redesigned the site around life events such as the birth of a baby, aged care and entering higher education.

“We saw big improvements in what we call search authority, which is the findability of content through particular key life journeys and life events,” Adobe APAC digital practice director John Mackenney said.

“It improved by nearly 20 percentage points on the enhanced myGov site.” This was because of well-written, findable content, and better site performance, Mr Mackenney said.

“MyGov now has a site speed on both mobile and desktop comparable to leading corporates,” he said.

The myGov site and app is one of the most visited government websites in the country, with up to 1.5 million engagements each day, more than the total daily users of public transport across Australia.

The site is now tightly integrated with its sister site, Services Australia, through more than 400 bridging links to online accounts. These take visitors to the exact place in the service portal where they need to take the next action, creating a warm handover, rather than dropping customers off cold at myGov’s front door.

Also rated well was the National Disability Insurance Scheme website, which similarly leapt up the rankings to be second in the survey. This came after a major effort to improve accessibility.

Adobe evaluated desktop and mobile performance, using 1200 user scripts to test customer experience, site speed and performance, and digital equity. The survey included all the top-level domains each state jurisdiction offers citizens, such as qld.gov.au.

Best and worst states

In the 2022 survey, Australian government sites ranked lowly against their global peers, with poor readability and lack of alternative languages dragging down almost all of them apart from nsw.gov.au.

Investments in language options, accessibility, improved readability and centralising information into a singular portal dramatically improved the standing of Australian government websites in 2023.

The focus on widening access sharply lifted digital equity up by 33 per cent on average. Digital equity measures readability, accessibility and language options. Focusing on mobile design and optimisation increased site speed and performance by 19 per cent. Consumer experience was essentially unchanged.

Best and worst government websites

The nsw.gov.au site continues to rank No. 1 among the states, but Queensland and Victoria stood out as the big improvers.

The qld.gov.au website recorded the most significant year-on-year rise in the benchmark rankings, reaching 70.4 out of 100. It also achieved the highest site performance score.

Victoria would have ranked better except for the poor performance of vic.gov.au.

The speed and delivery of the state’s top-level domain was significantly lower than all jurisdictions other than the Northern Territory and the ACT, particularly for mobiles.

Mobile phones now account for around 70 per cent of all traffic, but the survey found Australian sites were marked down for poor mobile interface and responsiveness to the variety of mobile screen sizes.

But overall, Australia lifted its score by 10 points, from 58 out of 100 in the 2022 survey to 68.4 in the 2023 survey. Across the six benchmarked governments of the UK, the United States, Singapore, New Zealand and India, Australia ranked second behind the UK.

But while Australian public sector sites have significantly improved their game, they still lag behind top-performing private sector sites. These include the Commonwealth Bank and Telstra, with an average score of 86.6 – 12 points higher than the top-ranking government site, myGov.

Making government intelligible

The improvement in myGov followed a nearly decade-long campaign at Services Australia to improve readability and comprehension.

The agency worked closely with the Sydney-based Plain English Foundation, taking a whole-of-agency approach to improving writing, language and content design. Hundreds of pages were curated and rewritten to bring all the content into a single site.

Crucially, this push was heavily backed by agency leadership. It was rewarded when the Services Australia website (at the time known as the Department of Human Services) was certified as gold, based on an international standard in 2018.

It was the first Australian site to reach the gold standard, based on the ease of finding and comprehending information

The Services Australia site is a poster child for modern agile iterative improvement, with relentless A/B testing driving improvements such as dark mode reading and quick codes on every page so call centres can easily direct users to exact web pages.

Both the Services Australia and the myGov content sites are now tightly integrated. Significantly, both are run by the communications division and not the IT team, unlike many agencies.

Still ‘lots of legacy content’

Despite improvements across the board, Mr Mackenney said too many people had to navigate multiple sites to find authoritative content.

“We still have lots of legacy content across government content that contradicts itself. Over 65 per cent of people still go to six or more government websites in a year,” he said.

Whereas the states have all moved to authoritative single web “instances”, so users don’t need to navigate multiple sites and organisation charts, the federal government has quietly mothballed its top-level domain australia.gov.au.

During the pandemic, the top-level domain was the centrepiece of the Commonwealth’s communications efforts, but today the URL sends you to the prime minister’s official site. So much for “one APS”.

NSW saved more than $20 million by closing down the rampant duplication of websites and legacy content and moving to a single site. That consolidation took real leadership, with many agencies reluctant to give up their departmental web shopfronts. Canberra has yet to summon up similar courage.

Adobe provides the publishing platform for myGov, while the Services Australia site uses GovCMS, the open source Drupal platform the department of Finance offers agencies as a service.

This article was originally published on The Australian Financial Review.