Keep Residents Informed on Elections

Original Author: CivicPlus Marketing

As a municipal website administrator, you know what election season means: you can expect a huge spike in civic website traffic on November 5. FairVote estimates that 40 percent of the eligible population turns out to vote during a non-presidential election year. These voter turnout statistics translate to massive amounts of voter data that local governments will want to share online. If not properly managed, big data and large traffic volumes could wreak havoc on your civic website this Election Day.

At CivicPlus, our experience developing and hosting over 2,500 local government websites has revealed some simple, but essential best practices to keep local government websites fully operational and optimized for high traffic volumes during election season.

This year, keep residents informed regarding election results without compromising on the quality of their online interaction or the functionality of your website, by following these essential best practices.

Recommended Actions

1. Communicate in Advance: Communicate to your residents in advance when you expect post-election results. This will help to mitigate high volumes of repeat traffic throughout the day before results are available. Communicate anticipated timing to residents using all available communication platforms, including email and social media.

2. Set up a Designated Results Page: Post-election results as content

3. Add a Homepage Graphic: Create a prominently displayed, temporary graphic link from your homepage to make it easy for residents to find your election results page. The quicker users navigate to their destination page, the better your site's performance.

4. Direct Traffic to Your Results Page: Provide the specific link to your results page to news outlets, and post to social media to route residents directly to the appropriate page.

5. Mobile Optimize: Many residents will be checking election results on the go from their mobile devices. Make sure your content is mobile-friendly. If you post your election results on a site page on your website, your page will automatically be mobile-responsive.

6. Create a Short Page Title

   • Use a simple and succinct page title such as "City Name 2017 Election Results." Choose a page title that will help your SEO. The top of your webpage should include the page title, or something very similar, that is tagged with the HTML heading.

   • Depending on your content management system (CMS), this could be a manual or automatic process. For users of Web Central, this process is done automatically when your page title is created. The

     tag is important for search engines like Google™, Yahoo!®, and Bing that are indexing your site.

   • Your Web Central site is designed to be optimized for search engines, but you still have the flexibility to customize your menu text, title, description, and keyword fields with election results content to further enhance your SEO.

   • Remember that page titles should be 70 characters or fewer. If a longer page title is used, the page name will appear truncated on search engine results pages.

7. Add a meta description to your election results page that is less than 150 characters. If more than 150 characters are used, the text will again appear truncated on search engine results pages.

   • A good meta (page) description ensures that people using search engines that they are clicking on the correct page.

Not Recommended

The following advice will help you further optimize your website's performance on election day:

1. Do not post the election results in the form of a document, such as a PDF or Microsoft Word file. The repeated requests to serve up large files will slow your site speed and impact site accessibility.

2. For best performance, avoid posting a large number of graphics, or any graphics with large file sizes, to your election results page. This will slow your site's page-load speeds.

3. Do not use infographics to share election results. Infographics are typically large files, which will slow your site speed. On election night, when traffic volumes will be high, post results in text format only. If you do intend to create an engaging infographic for your residents regarding local election results, we recommend sharing it using social media or email instead of on your results page.

Resources

• Election Security Landscape Fact Sheet: Understanding Proactive Safeguards and Threats to Expect

• Empowering Communities: Strategies for Battling Misinformation During Election Seasons

• Prepare for Election Season and a Spike in Public Records Requests