Customer Trust in Website Score: EPG Global ONE Methodology
What It Is
The Customer Trust in Website Score (CTWS) is EPG Global ONE’s proprietary tool. It is a score from 0 to 100 that shows how much the errors and problems found on a website may reduce a customer’s trust in the company and make it harder for them to contact the company or make a purchase.
The methodology is based on experience auditing websites of more than 130 companies and a database of more than 2,200 identified errors that can reduce customer trust.
Why We Calculate the CTWS
The score turns website audit results into one clear number and shows how much the identified problems may affect customer trust in the company. Follow-up audits make it possible to evaluate the results of corrections and see how the condition of the website changes after later updates.
Three Customer Questions
The score is based on three questions customers ask themselves when using a website:
- Do I matter to this company? Does the company pay attention to my language and to the quality of its texts and translations? Are there untranslated fragments on the website?
- Is this easy for me? Is it easy to understand the offer, find the information I need, move around the website, contact the company, submit a request, or make a purchase?
- Are professionals working here? Are there errors, contradictions, or technical problems on the website that make me doubt the company’s care and professionalism?
Five Criteria
- Language and grammar: errors in the text, signs of machine translation, untranslated fragments.
- Meaning and accuracy: whether prices, terms, and figures are stated correctly and whether pages and language versions contradict each other.
- Clarity for the customer: whether the company’s offer and the text are easy to understand.
- Presentation: leftover template text, mixed alphabets, broken layout, and other presentation errors visible to the customer.
- Website functionality: whether it is easy to find the information needed, move around the website, contact the company, submit a request, or make a purchase; whether links, forms, and other elements work correctly.
How the Score Is Calculated
Scoring starts at 100 points. Points are deducted for each identified error based on its impact on the customer:
- critical, minus 10 points: prevents the customer from contacting the company, submitting a request, or making a purchase, or misleads the customer, for example a wrong price, a phone number that does not work, or a link to the wrong page;
- serious, minus 4 points: noticeably reduces trust or makes information harder to understand, for example machine translation, untranslated fragments, or contradictions;
- minor, minus 2 points: does not prevent the customer from using the website but weakens the overall impression, for example a typo or a presentation error.
The same repeated error is counted once. When classifying text and translation errors, principles used in professional translation quality assessment are considered, including MQM. The same criteria and calculation rules are applied to all audited websites, which makes results comparable.
Scale
Customer Trust in Website Score (CTWS)
Calculation Example
On the home page of a clinic network, 2 critical errors, 8 serious errors, and 2 minor errors were found.
Score: 100 − 20 − 32 − 4 = 44 points.
If all critical and serious errors are corrected, and no other changes are made, the score will be 96 points.
What the Score Does Not Evaluate
The score reflects only the errors and problems visible to the customer on the audited pages as of the audit date. It does not evaluate search engine rankings, loading speed, or design quality.