What are the most common local government website mistakes, and how do you fix them?

The most common local government website mistakes are structural, not cosmetic. Sites are organized around departments instead of the tasks residents came to do, important information is locked in PDFs, search is hard to find or misses documents, and accessibility gets pushed to "phase two." Each of these sends people to the phone or the front counter. Most of the fixes cost staff time rather than money, and the same work moves the site toward WCAG 2.1 AA, the standard in the ADA Title II rule.

Below are eight of the most common, why each one matters and what to do about it.

Why fix local government website mistakes now?

Two reasons. First, residents don't read your pages closely. In Nielsen Norman Group testing, 79% of users scanned new pages and only 16% read word by word (opens in a new tab). If the answer isn't in a heading or a first sentence, many people won't find it.

Second, there's a deadline. The DOJ's ADA Title II rule (opens in a new tab) requires state and local government web content to meet WCAG 2.1 AA. After an interim final rule in April 2026 (opens in a new tab), the dates are April 26, 2027 for governments serving 50,000 people or more, and April 26, 2028 for smaller governments and special districts. The rule may still change: the National Federation of the Blind sued in May 2026 to undo the extension (opens in a new tab). Usability work and accessibility work overlap heavily, so starting now pays off either way.

Is the site organized by department instead of by task?

This is the mistake behind most of the others. Menus that mirror the org chart ("Treasurer," "DPW," "Building & Zoning") assume residents know which office handles what. Most don't. They know what they want to do: pay a water bill, get a permit or find out when the leaves get picked up.

GOV.UK, the UK government's site, dropped its department-by-department structure and moved content into topics built around what users need (opens in a new tab). Its first design principle is "Start with user needs." (opens in a new tab) The U.S. Web Design System says the same: "Real user needs should inform product decisions." (opens in a new tab)

Getting there doesn't require a research budget:

• List the questions your front desk answers most often in a typical week.
• Check the site's search log and analytics for the most-searched terms and most-visited pages.
• Put the top tasks on the homepage as plain links ("Pay a bill," "Report a problem," "Find a meeting").
• Keep the department pages, but treat them as a second way in, not the only way.

In Marine City, Michigan, the city clerk told a local paper in 2024 that "if we're more than three clicks to find information, we've lost the residents." (opens in a new tab)

Are important documents stuck in PDFs?

Probably. Agendas, permit applications, budgets and newsletters often go up only as PDFs because that's the format they were made in. Nielsen Norman Group's research found PDFs hard to read on screen (opens in a new tab): they're built for paper, they lack navigation, users abandon them, and on phones they force pinching and zooming. GOV.UK adds that PDFs are harder to keep current and harder for people who change text size or colors (opens in a new tab).

The ADA Title II rule also treats PDFs carefully. Documents posted before the compliance date are generally exempt, but not if the public still uses them to apply for or access a service (opens in a new tab), and an exempt document loses that status if it's edited after the compliance date.

What helps:

• Put the information on a web page first, and offer the PDF as a download when people need to print it.
• Replace fillable PDF applications with online forms.
• Post agendas and minutes as readable pages with Agendas & Minutes, not only as scanned packets.
• Keep the PDFs you do need in one Document Center with clear titles and dates.

Can residents actually find things with search?

Search is where lost visitors go, so it has to be easy to spot and it has to return the right things. Nielsen Norman Group recommends a visible search box on every page, near the top, rather than a "Search" link (opens in a new tab), and notes that most searches are only a word or two long.

Search also has an accessibility side. WCAG 2.1 AA requires more than one way to find a page (opens in a new tab), such as search plus a site map or a clear menu. Federal agencies have it in law: the 21st Century IDEA Act requires new and redesigned federal sites to contain a search function (opens in a new tab), and it's a good model for local governments too.

Run a quick test. Search the site for the five things people ask about most. If the top result is an old news post, a 2019 PDF or nothing at all, search needs work. Site Search covers pages, documents and meetings in one box, so a search for "budget" finds the budget.

Is the writing in plain language?

Government pages often read like the ordinance they came from. That makes them slow to scan and easy to misread. In the same Nielsen Norman Group study, concise text improved measured usability by 58%, and a concise, scannable, objective version improved it by 124% (opens in a new tab).

Federal agencies have been held to this since the Plain Writing Act of 2010 (opens in a new tab), which defines plain writing as writing the audience "can readily understand and use." The law doesn't cover local governments, but the federal plain language guidance (opens in a new tab) works for any public site.

A few habits do most of the work:

• Start each page with what most people came for: the date, the fee, the deadline, the phone number.
• Use the words residents use, like "trash pickup" rather than "solid waste collection."
• Spell out acronyms on first use, or drop them.
• Keep paragraphs to a few sentences and use lists for steps.

Does the site work on a phone?

It has to. Pew Research Center found that 91% of U.S. adults own a smartphone, and 16% are smartphone-dependent (opens in a new tab), meaning they have a smartphone but no home broadband. For those residents, the phone version is the only version.

"Responsive" isn't enough on its own. Test the real tasks on a phone:

• Can you pay a bill, find the next meeting and report a pothole without zooming?
• Do menus open and close with a thumb?
• Do links open PDFs that are unreadable at phone size?

Watch out for homepage sliders too. Nielsen Norman Group found that auto-advancing carousels hide information and reduce accessibility (opens in a new tab), and users tend to skip moving content as ads. WCAG requires that anything moving for more than five seconds can be paused, stopped or hidden (opens in a new tab). For urgent news like a boil-water notice, a fixed banner and Alerts & Notify Me text and email messages do the job better.

Is accessibility treated as a later project?

On most of the web, it is. WebAIM's 2026 scan of the top one million home pages found detectable WCAG failures on 95.9% of them (opens in a new tab). The most common problems:

These are fixable with templates and training, which is why accessibility belongs in the design from the start. You can run a free scan with the ADA Title II website checker to see where a homepage stands. Automated tools catch only some problems, though. WebAIM notes that not every failure can be detected automatically (opens in a new tab), so keyboard and screen reader testing still matter.

Two things to avoid. Don't rely on an overlay widget: the FTC ordered an overlay company to pay $1 million (opens in a new tab) over claims its tool could make any site WCAG-conformant. And don't forget vendor tools. The ADA Title II rule says calendars, maps, reservation systems and payment systems (opens in a new tab) added to a government site generally have to meet WCAG 2.1 AA too.

Do meeting notices and payments have one clear home?

Two tasks cause a lot of confusion on public sites, and both have extra rules in Michigan.

Meeting notices. Under Michigan's Open Meetings Act, a public body that posts agendas or minutes online at least monthly must post notice of special and rescheduled meetings at least 18 hours ahead on its homepage or on a dedicated notices page with a prominent homepage link (opens in a new tab). That rule is Michigan-specific, but a predictable spot for notices helps residents anywhere. Post them through News & Notices and show meetings on the Calendar.

Payments. Many Michigan communities take tax and utility payments through BS&A Online (opens in a new tab), a separate site. It's easy to end up with "pay here" links scattered across the treasurer, utilities and building pages, each worded differently. Use one Payments page that explains what can be paid where, then links out.

Is old content piling up with no owner?

Sites that nobody owns drift. Old event pages, outdated fee schedules and duplicate copies of the same form stay up for years, and search keeps finding them. GOV.UK's guidance points out that stale documents lead to broken links and out-of-date information (opens in a new tab).

A simple routine keeps this in check:

• Give every section a named owner on staff.
• Add a "last reviewed" date to key pages and check them at least once a year.
• Archive old material in a clearly labeled archive area. Under the ADA Title II rule, archived content qualifies for an exception (opens in a new tab) only if it's kept for reference, stored in a dedicated archive area and left unchanged.

Ownership also applies to the site itself. Before you sign or renew a website contract, ask whether you can export all of your pages and documents and keep your domain if you leave. If the answer is unclear, a future redesign gets much harder.

Where should staff start?

Pick the fixes that reach the most residents for the least effort:

1. List the top 10 tasks and make sure each is one click from the homepage.
2. Turn the most-used PDF forms into web forms.
3. Test search with the top 10 search terms.
4. Run an automated accessibility scan, then fix contrast, alt text and form labels.
5. Try every top task on a phone.

None of these need a redesign to start. If the platform itself is what's getting in the way, that's a sign it's time to look at a new one.