Why Silktide Index scoring doesn’t match your paid Silktide scoring
The score you see for your website in the Silktide Index can be different from what you see inside Silktide, if you are a paying customer. In fact, you should expect this.
Here are the main reasons, in descending order of significance:
The Silktide Index only tests a small sample
The Silktide Index tests up to 125 webpages and 25 PDFs. Your full website tested by Silktide may be much larger, and score differently. This is nearly always the largest factor.
The URLs you test may be different
The Silktide Index is given a list of domain names to test, e.g. example.com. By default, it tries to test all of the HTTP and HTTPS pages inside that domain.
Most of our paying customers will be more precise and may break their websites into pieces. The composition of these can affect your score.
Paying customers default to WCAG 2.1
The Silktide Index scores all websites for WCAG 2.2. Paying customers see WCAG 2.1 by default, with the option to view WCAG 2.2 on demand.
This is because at the time of writing, WCAG 2.2 has not been finalized, and no legislation currently requires WCAG 2.2 compliance; we still give you the option to prepare by looking at WCAG 2.2 in advance.
Paying customers can make decisions
As a Silktide customer, you can configure your tests to work differently (e.g. ignoring WCAG AAA, or making a decision to ignore some specific issues). These decisions can affect your scores.
The Silktide Index intentionally scores every website the same way, to provide fair scoring. No decisions are permitted.
The Silktide Index doesn’t test private pages
Many of our paying customers choose to test private pages, such as those behind a login area, a firewall, or some other restriction. The Silktide Index only considers publicly available webpages.
The Silktide Index ignores some potential issues
The Silktide Index has to work without human intervention, whereas the main Silktide product can afford a little more manual work for greater accuracy.
One example: invisible form fields are not checked for labels by the Index. We have found that an unreasonable number of these issues can be false positives unless a human can review them. For the paid Silktide product, we prefer to raise these issues as they can be manually reviewed.
See more
- Frequently asked questions
- Who are Silktide
- What is the Silktide Index?
- What is "accessibility"?
- How does the Index work?
- How does Silktide choose which pages are tested?
- How accurate are the results?
- Do monthly report results replace the previous month's results?
- Why has my score changed when my website hasn't?
- Can I increase the number of pages tested or test more often?
- How can Socitm members access their free monthly report?
- How do I unlock more recommendations?
- What are the WCAG compliance levels?
- What do I get if I become a paying Silktide customer?
- If I score 100%, am I fully accessible?
- When does the Index report run?
- Will you test my website mid-month?
- How do I add my website to the Silktide Index?
- Why is my website marked as 'not tested'?
- Why Silktide Index scoring changed in 2023
- What are badges?