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.