Assessing Colombian Government Websites

September 16, 2020

Citizens and businesses rely on government websites to access important information and services. Unfortunately, many Colombian government websites fail to meet basic website standards for security, speed, mobile friendliness, and accessibility.

 

The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the importance of citizens and businesses having secure and reliable access to online government services. Unfortunately, many Colombian government websites fail to meet basic website standards. This report used publicly available tools to test the page-load speed for both desktop and mobile browsers, mobile-friendliness design, security, and accessibility of 42 Colombian government websites. All websites failed at least one test. Many of the sites are slow, difficult to use on mobile devices, inaccessible, and insecure. As such, they make it unnecessarily difficult to find government information online and expose users to security risks.

 

To assess whether Colombian government websites performed adequately, we compared their performance to the performance of 20 popular nongovernment Colombian websites, such as Wikipedia.org and eltiempo.com. We established a benchmark score for each test—typically one standard deviation below the average score of popular nongovernment websites—and Colombian government sites had to meet or exceed a test's benchmark to pass.