Acquia Optimize is rebranded as Acquia Web Governance. All product components now feature the new Web Governance logo.

If you have any questions about the rebrand, contact Acquia Support.

Performance module: Upgraded Google Lighthouse from 12.2 to 12.8, improving underlying performance and security. There are no changes in the user interface or scan reports.

History Center: The Compound Export overlay includes information about content that is excluded from the export file.

Inventory: Resolved an issue where the pages overlay would not open when clicked in the Links section.

New Feature: Readability Checker in Quality Assurance¶

You can now assess the readability of any text instantly, without waiting for a full page or domain scan. The text is analyzed based on the readability method that is configured for your domain. You will receive a score almost instantly.

How to use:

• Go to Quality Assurance → Readability → Readability Checker

• Paste in your text (up to 100,000 characters)

Domains Overview: The scan cadence column now displays the date of the last scan. Previously you had to hover over an icon to find this information.

Admin Settings: The list of languages is now sorted alphabetically when you add or edit a domain.

WCAG 2.2 Support in PDF Scans¶

You can now scan PDFs for accessibility compliance with WCAG 2.2 guidelines.

How to enable: Navigate to Edit Domain → Features and select WCAG 2.2 in the PDF Accessibility dropdown.

Stop Scans Stuck in Retry Status¶

Both Admin and Regular users can now stop scans that are stuck in “Retry” status without needing to contact Support.

How to use: Go to the domain dashboard, click “Scan Info”, and use the scan status modal to stop the scan.

Detect Broken Links on Sitemaps¶

Web Governance now detects broken links directly on your domain sitemaps.

Any broken links found will be listed in Quality Assurance module → Links → Broken Links on Sitemap.

Please note: Broken sitemap links are not included in your QA compliance score.

Extension: Unified CTAs for Accessibility Issues¶

The call-to-action (CTA) buttons for handling accessibility issues in the Extension now match the experience in the web application:

• Error: "Mark as Fixed" and "Mark as Ignored"

• Warning: "Mark as Fixed" and "Mark as Ignored"

• Review: "Mark as Reviewed"

Quality Assurance: Fixed filter options for response code 406 in the Broken Links view.

Accessibility

• FastTrack issue count now displays correctly.

• Color Contrast Tool features have been retired due to low usage. If you relied on this tool, we recommend Color Contrast Checker as an alternative with the same functionality.

Performance: History view now displays more than 10 entries in the selected date range.

Statistics: Exports now function properly for the Events and Site Search views.

General UI: Tooltip hover texts now display correctly.

New comparison ranges in the compliance trends report¶

The Compliance Trends report is updated:

You can now compare against quarterly and yearly trends. 
 

Addition of Acquia ID to the Acquia login experience¶

Web Governance is updated to allow users to log in through Acquia ID with a Login with Acquia ID button on the Web Governance login page. If a user does not have an account on Acquia ID, they can create one with the self-service process.

For successful login, a user must have an existing Web Governance account and an Acquia ID account with the same email address. After the user logs in with Acquia ID, they are redirected back to Web Governance. If the user logs out from the Web Governance platform, they are logged out from the Acquia ID platform.

Developers who want to log in on Web Governance through Acquia ID must use this URL: https://login.monsido.com/oauth/authorize?xb=1.

For more information about implementation and setup of Acquia ID, visit this page.

Accessibility Checks Update – Rollout Completed¶

Web Governance has completed the latest Accessibility Checks update. As a result, you may notice a change in your compliance scores.

All customers now have this update enabled. If your domains have not yet started scanning with the new guidelines, they will do so in your next scheduled scan.

For a comprehensive log of all changes, visit Acquia Docs.

Usability Improvements in the UI¶

Web Governance has delivered a series of usability enhancements:

Domains Overview:

• Updated scan cadence icons and improved tooltip texts.

• The same updates are available in Admin Settings → Domains.

Domain Picker:

• Domain group names span up to two lines, which prevents truncation.

Accessibility Checklist:

• Errors, Warnings, and Reviews are visually separated into clear categories.

• Confirmed errors always appear at the top, which allows you to prioritize resolutions more easily.

Minor Improvements & Fixes¶

Performance Module:

• Resolved pagination issues that occurred when users removed a page.

Scanning:

• Improved page detection with the Puppeteer rendering engine.

• Fixed issues where certain domains were stuck in “retry” status.

Browser Extension:

• Tooltips display properly when the Extension is left-aligned.

Heatmaps:

• Fixed duplicate entries that appeared in search results when users added a new rule.

Statistics:

• Fixed column sorting in the Events view.

Accessibility:

• Check 344 for target size (2.5.8) more accurately highlights only actionable interactive elements, which reduces the number of unnecessary review items. This should positively impact accessibility scores.

Main UI:

• Fixed issues with plural strings that were not translated properly.

Extension: Improved Highlighting Functionality¶

Web Governance has simplified and improved the way highlighting works in the Web Governance Extension to deliver a more consistent and reliable user experience.

Previously, when users clicked the Highlight button a transparent overlay layer was applied across the entire website, with highlighted borders and an orange background. The border colors varied by module, and the implementation often conflicted with page or CMS styles.

Now, highlights are applied directly to the target element with a uniform red border, regardless of module. This streamlined approach reduces complexity, minimizes errors, and ensures cleaner compatibility with website styles.

Resumed Rollout of Accessibility Checks Update¶

Web Governance has resumed the periodic update to Accessibility checks, which enhances the accuracy and quality of Accessibility scan results.

As part of this update:

• This can cause changes to your compliance scores due to improved detection logic.

  Visit the detailed changelog for full transparency.

• The update is currently enabled for 40% of customers globally and will be rolled out to all customers within the next two weeks.

#Web Governancecontinuously monitors performance and scan quality as the rollout progresses.

Extension¶

✔ Fixed an issue where Statistics data in the Extension did not always match the data shown in the web app.
✔ Resolved a bug that caused Readability scores to not appear when users did a scan on external pages.
✔ Fixed an issue where ignored Accessibility violations continued to appear in the issues list.
✔ Implemented error handling for policy highlights with the use of limit and exclude rules.
✔ Resolved a problem where Quick Scan did not consistently use refreshed tokens.

Statistics¶

✔ Fixed an issue where IP Exclusions were not applied correctly to domain groups.

Web Governance is Now a Cloudflare Verified Bot¶

The web crawler has been officially added to the Cloudflare list of Verified Bots.

As a verified bot, our crawler can now scan Cloudflare-hosted websites without the need to adhere to the restrictions and rate limits that typically apply to non-verified bots. This results in smoother, more reliable scans with fewer issues related to blocked or throttled traffic.

🔹 No action is required by Cloudflare customers. This improvement is automatically applied.

Reports

✔ Heatmaps Summary with Detailed Clicks: 

Pagination is added to improve performance and resolve slow load times for reports with large data sets.

Platform & Integrations

✔ Added BayWSF CMS deeplink integration.

Reports

✔ Broken Links Summary: Corrected a column header that was previously mislabeled.

Reports

✔ Compliance Trends (Mobile View): Fixed incorrect wording for improved clarity on mobile devices.

Reports

✔ Compliance Trends & Domains Overview: Resolved a sorting issue in the Last scanned column.

History Center

✔ Fixed a bug where the Checks passed/failed data series was missing from Accessibility charts.

PageAssist

✔ Two previously untranslated interface strings are now localized across all supported languages.

New Report: Compliance Trends¶

Issue: 

It was difficult to identify trends and optimize compliance strategies on multiple domains.

Solution:

Acquia now provides a centralized way to analyze and compare data on multiple domains. The new Compliance Trends report enables users to generate comparative reports with a few clicks. This report provides a side-by-side view of compliance scores across all domains in an account. It also compares the most recent scores with those from the last scan conducted within the past 30–60 days.

Users can now track compliance trends over time to make more informed, data-driven decisions.

How to access: Navigate to the Report Center and scroll to the Consolidated Reports section.

Web Governance Drupal Module¶

Acquia introduces the official Web Governance Drupal Module, which is available for all Web Governance accounts.

Key features:

• It can be installed from within Drupal

• It appears on the edit screen in Drupal, users can run a quick scan before they publish their pages.

• It provides results for Accessibility, SEO, Data Privacy, and Readability.

This integration streamlines page optimization for Drupal users and ensures that key compliance and quality checks are performed before the content goes live.

Policies¶

✔ AI-Assisted Policies: Increased font size on the conversation screen from 12px to 14px for better readability.
✔ AI-Assisted Policies: Added an option for users to reset a conversation with the AI bot.

Quality Assurance¶

✔ Added sorting options for the "Misspellings" and "Potential Misspellings" columns in the Pages with Misspellings view.
✔ Added broken link response codes to the "Broken Links Per Page" CSV export file.

Scans¶

✔ Resolved an issue where scans in "Retry" status would attempt to re-scan indefinitely, blocking the queue. Now, if a scan fails 20 times, the domain is set to inactive, and an email notification is sent to account users.

AI-Assisted Policies¶

The Policy Assistant is a new AI-powered feature within Web Governance Global Policies that makes creating custom policies effortless. With a conversational interface, users can interact with the AI Assistant to generate policies tailored to their specific needs.

Once a policy is created, users simply select the domain(s) to apply it to during scans.

Availability: AI-Assisted Policies is available exclusively to customers with the Policies module enabled.

New Report: Compliance Trends¶

Managing multiple domains without a centralized way to analyze and compare data can make it difficult to spot trends and optimize compliance strategies.

The new Compliance Trends report provides a side-by-side comparison of compliance scores across all domains within an account. It highlights trends by comparing the most recent scores with those from the last domain scan within the past 30–60 days.

For the first time, users can easily track compliance trends over time and make data-driven decisions.

How to Access: Navigate to the Report Center and scroll down to the Consolidated Reports section.

Performance Module: Lighthouse Upgraded from Version 10 to 12.2¶

The Web Governance Performance module runs audits using Google Lighthouse, which has now been upgraded from version 10 to 12.2.

Key Notes:

• The Performance audits remain unchanged, ensuring consistency in Core Web Vital metrics and their weighting in the overall score.
• No major changes have been introduced between versions 10 and 12.2.
• This upgrade improves the quality and accuracy of Lighthouse scans.

Policies

Added an “Add Policy with AI” button to the Policy List and Global Policy Dashboard views, directing users to the Policy Assistant.

Domains Overview

Updated the status message for domain groups during scans from “No data available” to “Scan in progress” for better clarity.

Report Center

Simplified report names by removing the word "report" from all list entries, improving readability.

Browser Extension enhancements

Improved icon states in browser toolbar

We introduced a disabled state for the Browser Extension icon in the browser toolbar, that makes it easier for users to identify whether the extension is enabled or disabled on a webpage.

• Enabled: The icon appears in light blue.

• Disabled: The icon appears in grey.

This update helps prevent confusion when users forget that they previously disabled the Extension on a specific page and wonder why it does not open the next time they visit.

Browser Extension

Quick Scan progress bar

We replaced the static spinner on the Quick Scan screen with a progress bar. This enhancement provides users with clear visibility into the scan’s progress, and shows which stage it is in and how far along it has progressed.

Removal of legacy score calculation

The legacy compliance score calculation option has been fully removed from the Web Governance UI. This feature previously allowed users to use an older method of calculating compliance scores in Web Governance.

As part of this change, we have also removed the Account Settings menu in Admin Settings, where users previously enabled or disabled legacy score calculations.

Accessibility

• Resolved an issue where Mobile Accessibility guidelines were missing from the Features dropdown in Edit Domain, despite being enabled for the account.

Quality Assurance

• Fixed an issue where bulk actions in Misspellings were not working.

Statistics

• Resolved an issue where the Actions tab in Events displayed no data when the UI language was set to a language other than English.

Scans

• Fixed time out issues when the scan encounters pages that use Office365 login.

Browser extension

• Fixed an issue where double scrollbars appeared in the Content section.
• Resolved a scenario where the Extension displayed "No issues found" in modules even when issues were present.
• Added a toast message to confirm successful action when users click “Clear Extension Cache”.
• Resolved an issue on the View Options screen where the "Screen Resolution" section appeared twice.

New articles in the Accessibility Guide¶

• Heading is descriptive
• iframe elements with identical accessible names have equivalent purpose
• Each label describes its associated input element

These new articles provide guidance on best practices for resolving accessibility issues.