Performance and Accessibility Evaluation of University Websites in Nigeria

Nigeria grows every year with teenagers attaining the age to start their college education. Tertiary education institutions are also expanding to reach every sub-region of the nation. These institutions grew over the years to own websites that provide digital educational services to students, staff, and the general public. Despite the existence of these educational websites, there is a need to determine if the websites are achieving their goals satisfactorily. Optimizing for the quality of user experience and performance is key to providing user satisfaction and the long-term success of any site on the web. The aim of this study is to evaluate the performance and accessibility of the official websites of forty-nine (49) accredited Federal Universities in Nigeria by using the Google Lighthouse web auditing tool and Google core web vitals standard. Results from the study show that none of the websites evaluated totally conform to the core web vitals standards; only 1, 15, 3, and 5 universities had a >90% good score for the four metrics measured (performance, accessibility, best practices, and search engine optimization), respectively, which exposes significant room for improvement.