State of the WordPress ecosystem

Analysis
2

Here are the Lighthouse a11y scores for WordPress vs all other pages.

SELECT
  url IN (SELECT url FROM `httparchive.scratchspace.wordpress`) AS is_wordpress,
  JSON_EXTRACT_SCALAR(report, '$.reportCategories[2].score') AS a11y_score,
  COUNT(0) AS volume
FROM
  `httparchive.lighthouse.2017_10_15_mobile`
WHERE
  report IS NOT NULL
GROUP BY
  is_wordpress,
  a11y_score
ORDER BY
  is_wordpress,
  a11y_score

Also remember that Lighthouse results are only available for mobile.

image

a11y scores for WordPress pages tend to be more tightly packed into scores in the 85-90 range, while non-WordPress pages have more of a spread in the higher and lower scores. Maybe this could be explained by WordPress pages being built on top of a core template with many of the a11y best practices built in? Someone more experienced with standard deviations, help me explain this better :stuck_out_tongue:. The median score isn’t a very helpful metric because there are so few distinct scores (only 15). FWIW each page type has a median score of 85.71.

Another way of looking at the data is to set some threshold for a good score and measure the percent of scores that are better than it. For a score threshold of 90:

    WordPress: 29%
Not WordPress: 33%

But because of the big WordPress mode at 85.71, lowering the threshold to 85 shows WordPress being the winner:

    WordPress: 72%
Not WordPress: 69%

The thresholds are arbitrary, but this data shows that WordPress pages are less likely to get the really good or perfect a11y scores.

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