From healthcare to housing, energy to education, driver’s licenses to drinking water, Canada’s provincial governments deliver some of the most essential public services in the daily lives of Canadians. Unsurprisingly, Canadians rely on services at the provincial level more than any other level of government.

Canadian provinces are facing dual challenges: growing expectations for seamless digital-first services and systemic constraints, such as aging populations, a retiring workforce, and legacy technologies. The private sector has set a high standard for digital experiences, and Canadians now expect the same from their public sector. This puts pressure on provincial governments to deliver personalized, seamless, and efficient digital services — despite their limited resources. At the same time, provincial governments must continue their work to make online services more accessible to all Canadians, regardless of disability, language, or level of education.

Although most residents say they prefer using digital channels to access government services, only 35% are satisfied with their experiences. To fulfill their missions and meet citizen needs, provinces must take strategic steps to modernize service delivery and improve the citizen experience.

Adobe introduces the 2025 Digital Government Index for Canada.

2025 marks the inaugural release of the Digital Government Index (DGI) report for Canada. Created by Adobe’s digital strategy group, the DGI provides an annual benchmark for digital maturity in provincial governments. It evaluates how effectively government websites deliver digital services and highlights opportunities for provinces to strengthen their digital capabilities and improve service quality. With this inaugural report, DGI gives Canada’s provinces a powerful tool to gauge their digital performance against their peers and identify strategies to advance and track progress year over year.

How the DGI works.

The DGI rates Canada’s 10 provincial government websites based on the overall digital experience they deliver. Each province receives an overall score of 0 to 100, based on the average of its scores across three categories: Customer Experience (CX), Site Performance, and Digital Self-Service.

• Customer experience (CX) measures how effectively provinces support users in navigating their websites. It evaluates their ability to provide seamless experiences that make it easy for users to complete tasks, on both desktop and mobile. Adobe conducted user testing among 155 residents across ten provincial websites, using ten different CX metrics to rate their online experiences.
• Site performance evaluates the website’s ability to provide a fast, functional, and reliable website across all devices. Adobe crawled 5,000 webpages to assess desktop speed, mobile speed, SEO performance, user engagement, and overall site health.
• Digital self-service measures how easily users can independently access online services. To measure this, Adobe analyzed websites for accessibility, mobile-friendliness, readability, and language translation options.

The study also included a qualitative analysis for personalization (i.e., the ability to provide tailored and relevant user experiences). At key touchpoints throughout the user journey, we noted the presence or absence of certain personalization features such as customized dashboards, tailored service recommendations, and pre-populated forms.

Together, these measures help provinces quantify their digital maturity and assess the quality of the digital services they deliver to their residents.

Key takeaways from the 2025 DGI.

• Digital self-service is Canada’s biggest strength — with exceptions. Overall, provinces scored highest in this category, with a national average of 71.4 out of 100. This is largely due to their strong conformance with web accessibility standards. However, many sites fall short in readability and language translation options.
• Site performance saw the largest opportunities for improvement. 63.8 was the average score in this area, with provinces scoring lowest in user engagement and mobile site speed. This highlights a need for all provinces to ramp up their efforts to improve omnichannel service delivery with a particular focus on mobile.
• Mobile is much slower than desktop. Across all ten provinces, mobile site speeds lagged significantly behind desktop site speeds, with average scores of 54.1 and 78.4, respectively.
• Personalization starts strong, then drops off. While personalized features are common early in the user journey, they tend to diminish as users move downstream. This suggests that provinces have a strong foundation for personalization, but they need to develop deeper capabilities to support users in those critical later stages.

Here are this year’s top performers overall, and by category:

Top 3 performers overall:

1. Ontario
2. Saskatchewan
3. Nova Scotia

Top 3 performers by category:

Customer experience
1. Prince Edward Island
2. Ontario
3. Nova Scotia

Site performance
1. Nova Scotia
2. Alberta
3. New Brunswick*

*New Brunswick stands out for having the highest site speeds of all the provinces — on both desktop and mobile.

Digital self-service
1. Saskatchewan
2. Prince Edward Island
3. Ontario

Recommendations for provincial governments.

For provinces seeking to improve their DGI scores and advance their digital maturity, Adobe offers six actionable recommendations to help them get started:

1. Optimize for omnichannel — especially mobile. Service journeys often span multiple ministries and platforms and are commonly accessed through different devices. To deliver a more consistent experience, provincial governments can take practical steps to close the gap between mobile and desktop site performance. These include optimizing content for various devices, and applying accessible, mobile-first design principles across all websites and mobile apps.
2. Strengthen your technical foundation. A positive CX can be easily undermined by slow load times, under-responsive platforms, and spotty availability. In these cases, foundational issues like aging infrastructure or lack of website optimization may be holding provinces back. To address this, governments should invest in strengthening their technical foundation by adopting SEO best practices, upgrading their website infrastructure, and optimizing website design.
3. Expand multilingual options. Making websites accessible includes making information available to all language communities. By adding multilingual capabilities to their websites, provinces can empower more residents to self-serve — increasing their access to critical services while reducing administrative burden. Ministries can start by integrating translation tools into their content management systems to produce multilingual web content, and by using AI-powered chatbots for multilingual support.
4. Harness the power of personalization. Offering tailored experiences that align with user needs can strengthen user satisfaction and trust in government. By personalizing home and profile pages based on individual interests, search history and browsing patterns, provinces make it easier for residents to find the information they’re looking for. Deeper into the user journey, features like tailored dashboards, proactive chat support, and pre-populated enrollment forms can drastically improve the user experience.
5. Benchmark and learn from top performers. Provinces can study the strategies of top performers like Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, and New Brunswick to identify replicable practices in CX, site performance, and digital self-service. You can find more granular insights in the full 2025 DGI for Canada report.
6. Use the DGI as a strategic planning tool. Ministries can use the DGI not just as a benchmark, but as a roadmap to prioritize initiatives, allocate resources, and track yearly progress. Conducting a DGI assessment with Adobe can identify specific areas for improvement. Contact Kaila Cage (squires@adobe.com) for more information.

How did Canada perform overall in this year’s DGI? Find out by downloading your copy of the full report.

Brian Chidester is the Head of Industry Strategy for Public Sector and the host of The Government Huddle with Brian Chidester podcast from GovExec. Formerly, Brian served as the Industry Vice President for Global Public Sector at Genesys. He also has held global public sector leadership roles with OpenText, Arrow ECS and S&P Global. Mr. Chidester holds a B.S. in Communication Studies from Liberty University. He is a board member for the University of South Florida’s Muma College of Business, an advisor to the G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance at the World Economic Forum, and a member of the Forbes Technology Council.

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