/ / principles
Editorial principles
WQI publishes scores on every public website that's been audited. Because those scores can be cited — in press, by regulators, in commercial outreach, by site owners themselves — we hold ourselves to public commitments. These are them.
What WQI is
WQI is a public registry that scores websites against a transparent, versioned methodology. Two pillars define the project:
- Independence. No site pays for its score, its placement, or anything else. The score for a site is the same whether the operator has heard of WQI or not. We never sell rankings or accept placement fees.
- Citability. Every factor traces to a public standard, a dated measurement, and an open methodology. Anyone — visitor, journalist, regulator, vendor, insurer — can cite a WQI score and verify it independently.
What WQI is not
- Not a debugger for site operators. The dossier is a by-product of public measurement, not a service tier.
- Not a per-factor specialist. PageSpeed Insights measures performance better in isolation; Mozilla Observatory grades headers in more depth. Our value is the combination across every dimension of public-web quality, evaluated to a level that matches or exceeds the specialist on each axis. The score is what those add up to.
- Not an editorial outlet. We measure facts. We do not editorialize about a site's content, its business, or its politics.
How we measure
Our measurements come from four sources, each with its own provenance:
- Live site probes. Every score is grounded in a fresh fetch of the site, dated to the minute. Re-scans on demand at any time.
- External signals. Regulator-grade public data — RDAP, Wayback Machine, certificate transparency logs, blocklists, DNS-over-HTTPS resolvers — pulled per scan and cited.
- Platform capabilities. Documented from each platform's official documentation, dated, and re-verified on a regular cadence. We do not publish criticism of a platform without a sourced citation for the underlying claim.
- Standards. RFC, WCAG, GDPR, ePrivacy, FCC, and other published standards — referenced in the /standards directory with citation, version, and last-reviewed date.
Editorial commitments
These nine rules govern everything we publish about every site, every platform, every standard.
- Citation per claim. Every platform-attributed criticism includes a URL to the platform's documentation, a retrieval date, and a verbatim quote. No exceptions.
- Plan-aware. Where a platform's tiers differ in capability ("Squarespace Business plan and below"), we disambiguate. We do not aggregate across tiers when the capability differs between them.
- Time-stamped. Site measurements show a scanned date. Platform capability claims show a verified date. Standards show a last-reviewed date. All three are visible to the reader without clicks.
- Re-verification cadence. Capability claims older than 90 days are flagged for re-check. We do not ship stale criticism, and we publish the verification date so readers can judge for themselves.
- Measurement parity. For every factor we measure, we are at parity with the leading specialist tool for that dimension, or we say so plainly. We do not claim coverage we do not have. Where the specialist's API is the canonical data source for a measurement (Google CrUX for field-data Core Web Vitals, for example), we cite them as the source.
- Public corrections process. Email corrections@webqualityindex.com. We evaluate corrections against the published rule, not against the requester's identity or commercial relationship to us. Factual errors are taken down or amended within 48 hours of confirmation.
- Right of reply. Platforms and site owners can submit a public response to any criticism. We publish their words alongside our finding. We do not have to agree; we have to surface.
- Symmetric criticism. What we measure on Squarespace we measure on WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, and every other platform. No platform is singled out for criticism we would not make of an equivalent. No platform receives a pass for criticism we would make of others.
- Versioned methodology. Every score citation includes the WQI method version. When we change scoring rules, prior scores stay reproducible under the rules in force when they were computed. The /standards directory is itself versioned for the same reason.
When we get it wrong
We will get measurements wrong. We will misread documentation. We will publish criticism that turns out to be inaccurate. When we do:
- File a correction at corrections@webqualityindex.com with the domain or standard ID and the factual error.
- We evaluate against the published rule, not against the requester's identity.
- Factual errors are taken down or amended within 48 hours of confirmation.
- Every correction is logged with date and what changed.
The corrections process is the load-bearing trust commitment. Saying "we never make mistakes" is not credible. Saying "we change our minds when evidence shows up, publicly and within 48 hours" is.
Versioning
This document is itself versioned. When we change a commitment — or add one — the change is dated and the prior version remains accessible in the project's version control history. The current methodology version is WQI v1.2.0, stamped in the footer of every page on this site.