QA Higher Education simplifies website maintenance with Acquia Optimize.
increase in quality assurance compliance score
reduction in accessibility issues per page in a six-month period
reduction in issue response times
QA Higher Education is a private higher education provider in the UK. They work in partnership with universities, colleges, and education specialists across the UK to recruit, market, and deliver a range of programs from foundation level to undergraduate and postgraduate degrees.
Estelle Marasigan, website executive at QA Higher Education, and her team wanted a platform to help them fix accessibility issues on their website and steer them in the right direction.
Marasigan’s team was using a web governance platform, but not its accessibility function because “it was hard to use and the explanations of errors were hard to understand.”
QA Higher Education came on board with Acquia Optimize in mid-2020, using it on their own website as well as seven university websites that they manage.
QA Higher Education selected Acquia Optimize for its simple user interface that was easy for the team to use. Marasigan also shared that the team finds it “very clear and easy to see at a glance what the issues are” and believes that with Acquia Optimize, “it is easier to see how to fix the errors.” The team also thinks the dashboard feature is easy to use, especially for users who are not as technical.
Customer support was another driver of the move to Acquia Optimize. Marasigan shared, “[Acquia Optimize’s] customer support is excellent. Support is one of the main reasons we moved over to Acquia Optimize. My customer support manager has been great at answering all of my questions and we have regular scheduled catch-ups to learn how to use Acquia Optimize in the best ways. The live chat feature is great and I get a response in a very short time.”
Marasigan uses Acquia Optimize a few times a week to check on what new errors need to be addressed. “[Acquia Optimize has] helped us improve our workflow and processes and given us a clearer understanding of what needs to be done,” Marasigan noted. As they are tracking their scores, they’ve seen a great improvement in all areas. Marasigan shared that Acquia Optimize has “helped us learn more about technical issues and SEO” and helped them with website maintenance.
“I highly recommend using Acquia Optimize. If your goal is to improve accessibility and overall website presence, this tool will definitely help you in addressing issues. The platform is very easy and the support is excellent,” said Marasigan.
As one of the main goals is to improve web accessibility, Marasigan’s team meets with their web development team regularly to go through all the accessibility issues. They use Acquia Optimize’s reporting function to automatically send accessibility reports to relevant team members so they can stay on top of accessibility and track their scores. “It’s really helped us improve our scores,” Marasigan shared.
In one six-month period of using Acquia Optimize on their largest website, QA Higher Education reduced the number of accessibility issues per page by 23%.
With a new website being developed, QA Higher Education doesn’t want any of the old accessibility errors to come to the new website. They are using Acquia Optimize’s accessibility checks as a checklist for the new website so they can build accessibility into the site as they develop it. They are also planning on using Acquia Optimize to test the dev site.
QA Higher Education uses the Quality Assurance module regularly to monitor misspellings, broken links, broken images, and readability. Marasigan noted that, “The Quality Assurance module is really helpful in looking at issues like typos and broken links, issues that are easy to miss.” It’s these easy-to-miss issues that can have a negative impact on brand reputation and user experience. Since using Acquia Optimize on their largest website, QA Higher Education increased their quality assurance compliance score by 68%.
Marasigan and her team use the Policies module regularly as they have a lot of content that changes on a regular basis, such as a university course changing. They use Policies to search for and manage course names, fees for courses, old email addresses and staff names, old phone numbers and addresses, and large file sizes that can slow performance. The module helps ensure consistency across different content contributors as well as accurate and up-to-date information. “Policies is a real time-saver. It’s so much easier than having to find it all manually,” Marasigan noted.
Acquia Optimize’s Heartbeat module has helped QA Higher Education monitor site performance and respond to issues. Because downtime would have a great negative impact, such as students not being able to enroll or access key services, Marasigan shared, “we have alerts set up so if the website is down, it helps us fix the issues straight away.” As a result, QA Higher Education has reduced its issue response times by 74% since using Acquia Optimize.
