New University website soars up rankings
29 Oct 2014
Following the rebuild and redesign of our website in April, we have seen some very positive change in our comparative web rankings, according to two separate independent sources
1. Sitemorse - we are now the highest ranked of all Russell Group Universities
The ranking is based on more than 238 million checks that digital agency Sitemorse makes, assessing technical aspects of websites such as functionality, response time, coding quality and accessibility.
Their analysis covers 334 universities, colleges and HE institutions in the UK. The Q4 2014 ranking sees the University site climb from 73rd place (Q2) to 14th (Q4) overall and achieve top spot out of all Russell Group universities.
This significant improvement is mainly due to improved functionality and the inclusion of metadata (code needed by search engines to index a site) which formed a key aspect of the web rebuild. It's also worth noting that institutions above us in the rankings are far smaller and some much more specialised than us, making it far easier to achieve good results compared with huge complex sites such as ours.
2. SimilarWeb - we are now number 1 in the UK
SimilarWeb specialise in web measurement and online behaviour analysis covering a broad range of measures including number of visits and views, number of unique visitors to a site and the number of page views.
Their latest results based on the UK top 50 university and college websites rank Manchester in first place.
Although the new website gained many accolades from colleagues and users at the time of relaunch, it is great to have this in a more official and analytical capacity from two independent sources. It is all real tribute to the work done by colleagues from the Division of Communications and Marketing, and others across the University who contributed to this successful project.