Clustering university websites based on usability metrics: Insights from web vitals analysis

A university website is considered to be its main gateway to the world. The usability of a university website affects the way prospective students look for a program in a university for the first time, students who use the website, and university staff who access the website in their day-to-day tasks. After conducting a thorough literature review, we found that there is a lack of research when it comes to evaluating the usability of universities websites using web vitals. The aim of our study was to evaluate the usability of universities' websites using web vitals, and cluster universities based on usability. We quantitatively collected web vitals data from 485 universities, analyzed the relationship between university rankings and web vitals, and grouped the universities into clusters based on web vitals. Our findings showed that web vitals are effective metrics when it comes to precisely measuring the response time and the overall usability of universities’ websites. In addition, we clustered universities into three different groups based on web vitals to first class, second class, and third class universities.