Every week, the barometer measures what the websites of a panel of organisations show to anyone on the Internet, and compares them by sector, company size and country. Its aim: show progress, and help buyers assess their suppliers.
The barometer covers only a panel: lists of organisations built from public sources (popularity rankings of websites, public company registers, lists of public bodies, stock-market indices). The lists are refreshed every month around a stable core, so that changes can be followed week after week. Tests run by visitors on our free checks are never mixed into the barometer.
Organisations are grouped by sector, by size (very large, large, medium, small — so that small companies can be noticed by buyers too), by country of their head office, and by zone (European Union, United States, world). A group with too few organisations is not ranked.
Compliance and vulnerability come from the same non-intrusive checks as our free website check. Speed is an estimate: the home page is loaded 3 times on new connections, from a computer profile and a mobile profile, and we keep the median. The display time is then estimated from these real network measurements under two simulated networks (computer: 40 ms latency, 10 Mbit/s; mobile: 150 ms, 1.6 Mbit/s), as PageSpeed does. We also measure how stable the response time is.
Each score has its own ranking: an organisation can be very compliant and slow. The champion of the average must also reach a minimum on each of the three scores.
The calculation runs on Wednesday evening and the results are published on Thursday morning.
The checks are made by our robot, which identifies itself as TopSecuredScanner with a link to our method. It only reads public information: no password tried, no exploit, no injection. It never runs more than 2 checks at a time on the same server, always uses the same outgoing address for a given domain, and does not retry from another address when it is blocked. To have a domain excluded, use the removal form.