How Do We Calculate Your Site Performance Score?

We deployed the new performance level scoring system just over a month ago. Since that time, many of you have kept your articles current, reduced or eliminated the number of broken links on your sites, and improved the percentage of your faculty who have photos and bios. Thank you for all of the hard work.

There have also been a few questions about the nature of the scores. Some of you have questioned the need to fix broken links or to provide photos and bios for your part-time faculty.  Here's why we think you should always do both, even if the links are buried in something like an old article, or your department has a lot of part-time faculty.

Why Fix the Links?

A broken link on your site is a problem no matter how old it is or how buried it is. Even if an article is old, or buried, users may stil be referred to it by a search engine.  Broken links on these pages frustrate visitors to your site, who may leave it completely. These broken links also hurt the ranking of your site in Google.  When Google crawls the web it finds your old events and articles, follows their links, and, if they're broken, penalizes you for them.

Each month, the CHSSWeb system reviews each site for broken links. If it finds any, it emails a list of those links to the site's technical contact. Alongside each broken link on the list are the words "Fix it!" Clicking on those links will take you to the edit page for the content which has the broken link. From there you can update the link or deactivate or archive the content.

Economics went from 62 broken links to zero in the first week after we deployed the scores. It can be done. And once done, it's not hard to maintain.

Why Do I Have to Add Bios and Photos for Part-Time Faculty?


The faculty and staff bio sections on most sites get a significant amount of traffic. In the example shown here, 29% of the traffic to this site's home page results in a link to the faculty and staff section. Visitors who go to the course listings will also see links to individual bios. People see and use the bios. They are important.

The complaint we have heard is that there are so many part-time members of the faculty that it is too much work to maintain their bios. As with the links, getting photos and bios for most of your part-time faculty involves some work the first time but is not that hard to maintain. One department has forty-four part-time faculty members who have no photos or bios. Gathering that information will take time. But that same unit has hired only eight new adjuncts this semester. That is a more manageable number. If you get your bios up to date, you will find that they take much less effort to maintain. And the effort you take pays off, not only in a better-looking bio listing, but also in avoiding the message to students or to the part-time faculty themselves that they don't "count" as faculty. Indeed, we believe that many of your part-time faculty will be delighted to provide and have bios on your site. These bios need not have the detail that bios of tenure-track or full-time faculty have.

Do your adjuncts know that they can update their own bios?  

It can be done. And it looks much better when it's done right.

Is This You?

Or Is This?