Getting Started in SiteImprove: An H&S "Quick Start" Guide
SiteImprove is a tool that can help identify issues impacting your website's content quality, accessibility, search engine optimization, and more. It regularly scans your site in order to detect potential issues and provides insights organized into various reports that can help you identify opportunities for optimization. It also provides an accessibility "score" so you can track progress over time.
This is the H&S Web Team's "Quick Start" guide to SiteImprove. More detailed resources are available through the Stanford Online Digital Accessibility team, especially Kevin Murphy and Joey Elisa Koss.
Their team hosts weekly Office Hours on Thursdays from 11am-12pm (Pacific), and has a Slack channel where you are welcome to bring your questions. Kevin and team also offer 1:1 and group SiteImprove trainings. Their video tutorial is included at the end of this guide.
Getting Access and Logging In
Visit my2.us.siteimprove.com/ and log in with your SUNet ID. If you don't see anything, email murphykp@stanford.edu . If you are able to see the Welcome to SiteImprove dashboard, the next step is to gain access to your site(s).
To gain access, click the "SiteImprove Request Form" link under the heading, "New to SiteImprove?" Complete the SiteImprove SmartSheet request form .
Toward the middle of the page, you'll also notice a section called "Account Creation Instructions." This includes a link to a ServiceNOW ticket if you need extra assistance.
This section also has a few wonderful resources for connecting with community and finding additional ongoing support. In particular, you may wish to join the Slack channels and/or attend weekly office hours.
Orienting Yourself and Navigating SiteImprove
Once you've logged into SiteImprove, you'll see a lot of sections with a lot of text. Let's look at some of the most helpful areas.
(1) Your Website
At the top of the page and to the right of the main navigation menu, you'll see a dropdown menu with a list of websites. Click on this list and find the site you wish to work on.
If you edit content on more than one site, you'll want to check that you're looking at the correct data!
(2) The main navigation menu
The far left column of the main SiteImprove page is a list of menu options. From here, you can navigate to:
- Dashboards
- Core Wins
- Digital Certainty Index
- Accessibility
- Quality Assurance
- Policy
- Performance
- Search
- Analytics
We will discuss several of these in more detail in the next guide called, [Draft Revision] Things You Might Do in SiteImprove , but want to point out where they are located.
(3) [Name of the Dashboard that is currently shown]
At the top of the page, just below where you selected your website, you'll see another dropdown list. This might default to "Welcome to SiteImprove," as shown in the example above, or it may default to a different Dashboard. There are many, but the most helpful tend to be:
- _Commitment to A11y: Fall 2023
- _Commitment to A11y: Fall 2024
- _Commitment to A11y: Spring 2025
- -Broken Links
- -Content Creators Highlights
- Five Minute Fixes
- Editor dashboard (Accessibility)
(4) "Reports" and "Export" Buttons
Toward the top right of this page, you'll see buttons for "Reports" and "Export." These aren't necessarily helpful from this page, however, we want to point out these buttons as they appear on many pages within the various sections. You can use these to download your data, perhaps to capture a moment in time or to track ongoing work.
The Accessibility Menu
Clicking on the Accessibility option in the main navigation menu will bring you to an overview page. This section provides a lot of useful data about your site's accessibility progress. The "Site Target" submenu will display your site's current accessibility score, which is out of 100. This should be at or above 90%.
View the Current Stanford Accessibility Mandates to learn how you can improve your site's score.
A Quick Note
You are not alone in your efforts to fix every issue on your site! The H&S web team is your partner in this endeavor. For websites on our platform, we have taken the initiative to resolve most Level A issues, have added the accessibility link to every site, and have pointed out the specific audio and video content that needs attention. We are also always available for ongoing support and to answer any questions you have. Please reach out!
Video Tutorial