OMB officials said that they saw "improvement at or across over half" of the nearly 7,000 public-facing websites in terms of the public's experience navigating them.

OMB officials said that they saw "improvement at or across over half" of the nearly 7,000 public-facing websites in terms of the public's experience navigating them. fotograzia/Getty Images

‘Over half’ of federal websites got better in the past year, OMB official says

Metrics released by the Office of Management and Budget offer insight into how agencies are implementing the 21st Century IDEA Act.

The Office of Management and Budget released a new data snapshot into the performance of government websites last week, which showed some marked improvement in the public’s experience with those sites, but more work to go.

The big takeaway: “Of the nearly 7,000 public facing websites that the government had, we saw improvement at or across over half of those [in the last year], so that’s a really good example of driving impact at scale,” Jonathan Finch, the digital experience director at the Office of Management and Budget, told Nextgov/FCW. “The flip side of that is that we’ve just got a lot of room to improve in each of the individual metrics [and]... in terms of how we streamline the overall ecosystem.”

OMB released guidance on digital experience in 2023 to implement the 21st Century IDEA Act several years after it was passed in 2018. The law requires agencies to modernize their websites, digitize forms and more.

The newly released metrics are meant to both align with that guidance, as well as capture “foundational digital delivery expectations” like mobile friendliness, Finch said. OMB has been working on them since 2023.

Agencies were most successful in meeting the security metric, with 86% of scannable, public-facing website homepages meeting requirements.

Among the lowest rates of full compliance were for the use of a public feedback mechanism — 9% were fully compliant — and for search optimization — 14%. For design consistency, 25% of websites were fully compliant, and 29% met accessibility metrics. 

On the higher end, 41% of sites received good marks for mobile-friendliness and 61% for analytics.

“Federal government websites have room to improve across foundational digital delivery expectations,” the blog housing the data stated. 

The new data comes a week before the President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, and the Biden-Harris administration is touting its record on customer experience, or how the public perceives their interactions with the government, in the closing stretch before that turnover. How Americans experience the government’s web presence is one part of that.

CX has often been bipartisan — it was in the management agendas of both Trump and Biden, for example — although what happens to the work under the coming Trump administration remains to be seen, given Trump’s plans to drastically reshape the federal workforce, cut government costs and roll back equity-focused work.

Driving progress across agencies is among the biggest challenges for digital experience work, said Finch, noting that people looking for an answer to a question about the government may go through many government websites with information. 

“They’re still probably too often getting competing sources,” he said, calling it an area for continued work. 

There are 6,805 public-facing .gov and .mil websites across the executive branch, according to an inventory run by OMB as part of the IDEA Act guidance. Of that, “a small portion of websites” take up the “bulk” of traffic, the blog notes. The most visited sites also have better performance. 

Previously, Finch pointed to the “question of who owns digital experience” as a challenge, too, given that people across tech, communications and other teams all touch government websites.