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Methodology

86 factors · 14 Required 52 Recommended 32 Variable · method v1.2.0 · 8 categories ·updated 2026-04-28

Web Quality Index measures 86 factors across 8 categories. Each factor is auditable: click into any row to see what we measure, why it matters, and how to improve it. Methodology versions are immutable — changes ship as v1.1, v1.2, etc., and historical scores remain attributable to the version under which they were computed.

How WQI scores a site

WQI scores how much each site contributes to a healthy, useful web for the people who land on it. The score has two layers: a binary pass/fail on the items every modern site should meet (Web Standards) and a 0..100 grade on everything else (Web Quality). A site that passes both is a Positive Web Contributor.

Coverage by category

Reproducibility

Every WQI score can be independently verified. The 86 factor checks are deterministic — the same domain, scanned with the same rule set, produces the same factor results every time. Anyone with the published rules and access to public signals (DNS, HTTP, HTML, Wayback, RDAP, PageSpeed) can compute a score that matches ours.

We publish:

• The full rule for each factor (linked from the factor table below)
• The roll-up formula from factor → category → composite
• The method version every score was computed under, on every report page
• The data sources we query, including any licensed dataset we include

This matters because it means WQI cannot quietly favor or penalize any domain. If our number disagrees with an independently-computed one, one of us has either a stale measurement or a different interpretation of the rule. Send disputes to corrections@webqualityindex.com.

Factors · 86 total · live first, then by ticket

Each row is one measured factor. Click any row to see the rule, the data source, and the remediation guidance. Live factors run in production today; proposed factors are specified in the methodology but not yet measured.