2025 year end report

The UMAC Web Strategy team has 9 full time employees, 2 interns, 1 dotted line, and 1 vacant position. Across our team, we have 245 years of experience, with about 115 years at UW alone. The average amount of experience is just over 20 years, with almost 10 years at UW. Collectively, we have earned 35 awards and award nominations: 21 Advancement Star Award nominations with 2 Advancement Star Award winners, 1 Marilyn Batt Dunn Award nominee, 3 Distinguished Staff Award nominees, 1 IT Accessibility Capacity Building award, 2 Hermes Platinum awards, 1 CASE Platinum Silver award, 4 CASE Gold awards, and 2 CASE silver awards. We are divided into three teams: Web and Mobile Operations, Web Engagement, and Content Strategy and User Experience. This is our year in review.

Hosted sites

In 2025, across the nearly 180 sites hosted on our central content management system, our sites received 24,380,753 views, up 1.9% from 2024. We had 14,438,740 sessions with 8,213,484 users, up 4.5% rom 2024. Our overall engagement rate was 48.93%.

The United States provided the most traffic with 21,468,009 views. China was second with 752,637 views and India was third with 272,499 views. Closer to home, Washington was the largest source of traffic with 12,955,001 views. California was second with 2,182,641 views and Oregon was third with 1,383,413 views.

Desktop based browsers still accounted for most of the sessions in 2025 at 64.5%, but mobile browsers increased to 34.3% of all sessions. Google Chrome was the most popular web browser with 49.2%, followed by Apple Safari with 26.2% and Microsoft Edge with 8.8% of all sessions. Microsoft Windows was the most popular operating system with 35.2%, followed by Apple iOS with 27.1% and Apple Macintosh with 24.3% of all sessions.

Learn more about all hosted website traffic Learn more about technical data collected

UW Homepage

In 2025, the UW Homepage saw 4,983,385 views with 4,344,197 sessions from 2,877,918 users. The overall engagement rate on the homepage was 47.28%. The top sources of traffic were direct entry with 1,550,481 users followed by Google with 650,913 users. Our top referrals were direct entry with 1,503,487 users followed by organic search with 830,970 users. The most clicked navigation element was “Admission” with 76,223 clicks, with “Academic Departments” second with 75,371 clicks and “Colleges and Schools” with 71,955 clicks. “Students” was the most popular audience menu item with 44,093 clicks, followed by “Faculty & Staff” with 37,102, “Alumni” with 6,859, and “Parents” with 5,806 clicks.

Learn more about the UW Homepage traffic Visit the UW Homepage

Search

Our search received 1,009,886 views with 682,420 sessions from 299,095 users. The overall engagement rate was 86.27%. Our top search terms for 2025 were “workday” (8.030 views), “sage” (5,378 views), “academic calendar” (3,732 views), “transcript” (3,220 views), and “time schedule” (2,506 views). Additional popular terms were “library,” “maps,” “tuition,” “study abroad,” and “award portal.”

Learn more about the search traffic Visit the search page

Research Makes America

Launched in May of 2025, the Research Makes America site received 281,709 views. The engagement rate was 31.1% with over 204 thousand active users and 78 thousand engaged sessions. The average session duration was 2 minutes 8 seconds. The top sources for sessions were Google with 80.3% of traffic, followed by Taboola with 12.4% of traffic; The Seattle Times, social media, email from UW, and the UW Homepage comprised the remaining traffic. The most clicked items on the site were “University of Washington” (logo/wordmark) with 1,568 clicks, “sign up for alerts about threats to this important work” (link in text) with 523 clicks, “explore the new treatment approach” (link to story) with 355 clicks, “visit UW Impact to sign up” (button) with 274 clicks, and “UW makes strides in early disease detection (link to story) with 221 clicks.

Learn more about RMA website traffic Visit the RMA website

Boundless

In 2025, the Boundless site received 1,206,916 views from 1,070,650 sessions with 879,696 users. The overall engagement rate was 26.81%. The top pages on the site were “Decoding the universe” (402,790 views), “For your family, for our future” (245,874 views), “Turning the tide” (57,312 views), “Life goals” (52,025 views), and the homepage (31,500 views).

Learn more about Boundless website traffic Visit the Boundless website

Admissions

In 2025, the Admissions site received 6,165,607 views from 3,208,899 sessions with 1,668,689 users. The overall engagement rate was 61.85%. The top pages on the site were the homepage (821,957 views), “UW Net ID” (483,534 views), “Transfer” (227,153 views), “Apply” (227,014 views), and “Majors” (211,684 views).

Learn more about Admissions website traffic Visit the Admissions website

Accessibility score

Across all sites we host, we currently have an average 95% accessibility score in DubBot.

QR codes

In 2025, we created 473 QR codes, up 123.1% from 2024. Those codes received a total of 6,313 scans, down 31.5% from the previous year. The top QR codes were: “New Huskies Swag” (982 scans), “Homepage Survey” (783 scans), “UW Cherry Blossoms” (435 scans), “UW Climate Survey” (354 scans), and “Admitted Student Day 2025” (288 scans).

We currently have 44 assets in our infrastructure. In 2025, 16 assets were upgraded or migrated to newer technologies. Across all assets in 2025, we achieved an average uptime of 99.9771%, or 2 hours of total downtime.

Our hosting increased to 247 sites, with a little over 700 active users (content authors, editors, site administrators). We manage 39 domain names (a mixture of .com, .org, and other top-level-domains) and 90 subdomains (*.washington.edu and *.uw.edu) for the University.

Helpdesk

In 2025, the helpdesk received 538 helpdesk tickets, which is a 56% increase in volume from 2024. Our average first response time to a ticket was just under 24 hours. Our average time to resolution was around 10 hours. Our busiest month was August with 70 tickets. Thom received the most tickets at 203, and Lauren received the second most at 178. Thom had the shortest time to close at just over five and half hours.

Learn more about Helpdesk ticket activity Learn more about Helpdesk agent activity

Code releases

In 2025, the team had 7 code releases for the UW WordPress theme and 4 code releases for the Storytelling Modules WordPress plugin. The theme received 4,126 views on GitHub, and Storytelling Modules received 299 views.

Web Council attendance

In 2025, we hosted 9 meetings of Web Council reaching over 500 people at the UW. Our top meetings were our April meeting which featured a project perspective from UW Bothell, our November meeting which featured a presentation on Burnout by Thom Thorpe, and our June meeting which featured an introduction to our homepage project by Steven Norris.
The Web Council website received 3,956 views across 2,359 sessions and 1,675 users. The engagement rate was 63.20%. The most visited page on the site was our “Conference Calendar” which shows our community various conferences around the country that could be of interest.

In addition to Web Council, members of the Web Strategy team lead and participate in many other campus communities of practice including UW Drupal Users Group, WordPress Users Group, Front-End Technologies, Digital Marketing Insights, and Embedded Architects.

Learn more about 2025 Web Council meetings and attendance Learn more about 2025 Web Council website traffic Learn more about Web Council

Documentation website

In 2025, our Documentation website received 49,889 views, an increase of 31.5% from 2024. In addition, the site had 24,727 sessions from 14,166 active users with an overall engagement rate of 63.12%. The team added 27 new articles to the site, increasing our documentation to 77 pages.

Learn more about Documentation website traffic Visit the Documentation website

Mobile website

In 2025, our Mobile website received 1,310 views. In addition, the site had 990 sessions from 780 active users with an overall engagement rate of 66.87%.

Learn more about Mobile website traffic Visit the Mobile website

Projects

In 2025, the Web Strategy team participated in over 50 chartered projects and 70 internal projects. The most utilized team members were Jeff, completing 49 projects, Tiffany and Thom, each completing 29 projects, Teri, completing 16 projects, and Lauren, completing 13 projects. The most common project types were updates to existing web sites, building new web sites, and maintaining infrastructure. Our busiest quarter was spring with 23 projects, followed by winter with 22, summer with 21, and fall with 13 projects. Our busiest months were May and June.

Budget

In the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2024, and ending June 30, 2025, we spent 80% of our allocated funding. The single largest category was web hosting for the primary website accounting for 47% of our budget. Partner web hosting and accessibility remediation were our second third highest categories account for 25% and 12% of our budget, respectively.

Views: The number of app screens or web pages your users viewed per session. Repeated views of a single page or screen are counted.

Total users: The number of unique user IDs that triggered any events. The metric allows you to measure the number of unique users who logged an event.

Sessions: A session initiates when a user either: opens the website in the foreground or views a page or screen and no session is currently active (e.g., their previous session has timed out). By default, a session ends (times out) after 30 minutes of user inactivity. There is no limit to how long a session can last. More information on sessions: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9191807

Engaged sessions: The number of sessions that lasted 10 seconds or longer or had 1 or more conversion events or 2 or more page or screen views.

Engagement rate: The percentage of sessions that were engaged sessions. More information on engagement rates: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/12195621

New users: The metric allows you to measure the number of users who interacted with the website for the first time.

Active users: The number of distinct users who visited the website. An active user is any user who has an engaged session or when Analytics collects specific parameters that show engagement.

Sessions per user: The average number of sessions per user.

Top referrals: The channels by which users arrived at the website when they initiated new sessions. More information on channels: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9756891

Top sources: The specific referral to the website.

Scroll depth: The percentage down the page that the user scrolled. If someone scrolls at least 90% of a page, the value ’90’ populates the dimension.