ISDA Phase 1 website audit
Public site www.theisda.org. Prepared for Sprout Marketing and the Idaho State Dental Association. Analytics and signed-in member tasks are not in this report.
- 9.1 sHomepage mobile LCP, median of three runs
- 5 of 90Titled pages with a meta description
- 2 idsDifferent ADA community ids on live join links
Lab source: Lighthouse, headless Chrome, three mobile runs and one desktop run on seven templates. Crawl: 160 fetches, 102 content URLs after dropping login and sign-out clones, 90 with a title. The link queue was not exhausted. Field CrUX data was not available. Homepage accessibility score: 81.
Order of work
- Fix robots.txt, the sitemap, and the two join ids before a visual redesign. Those are live defects.
- Write the seven missing answers and an ungated advocacy summary in Phase 2.
- Hold the brand system for Sprout in Phase 3.
- Make mobile LCP, zoom, and contrast release gates in Phase 4.
- Migrate only the URLs that returned real content.
What people can do today
| Visitor | Can do | Stops here |
|---|
| Patient | Open Public Resources, read a short FAQ, and leave for Find a Dentist. | Find a Dentist is a 301 to findadentist.ada.org. There is no Idaho answer library for emergency care, seniors, veterans, or Medicaid. |
| Dentist deciding to join | Read a clear Join / Renew page: tripartite membership, license check, then dues. | Join Now and Online Application send people to two different ADA community ids. Renew and the “Join Idaho Dental” button both go to ada.org/renew. |
| Member looking for CE | See Annual Session, North Idaho Conference, and a component event form. | On-demand CE is behind Salesforce login. There is no filterable catalog, progress, or certificate history on the public site. |
| Legislator or member of the public | Open Legislative Priorities and read that a 2026 list exists. | The priorities document itself requires a member login. |
What is working and should stay
The office is findable: Contact Us shows (208) 343-7543 and 2404 Bank Drive, Ste. 210, Boise. Join copy explains ADA, ISDA, and the local component, and says membership starts after license verification and payment. Classifieds, events, staff, foundation, IDPAC, and IDIA are in the navigation. idahodental.org (no www) redirects to www.theisda.org. Find a Dentist correctly leaves for the ADA directory. Washington and Oregon constituent homepages use this same Sitefinity template, so the shell is not an Idaho identity.
Findings register
| Severity | Finding | Evidence | Owner | Phase |
|---|
| Blocker | Crawlers cannot read robots.txt. The URL returns the HTML maintenance page with HTTP 200. | /robots.txt title “Site is Down for Maintenance”. Lighthouse: 49 syntax errors. SEO score 77 on every inner page. | ADA template | Phase 5 |
| Blocker | There is no XML sitemap. /sitemap.xml is the HTML 404, also HTTP 200. | Title “Society | American Dental Association”. Same title on 12 soft-404 URLs. | ADA template | Phase 5 |
| Blocker | Mobile largest content is late on every template tested. | Median mobile LCP 5.5-9.6 s. Desktop LCP on the same pages is 1.5-3.2 s. | Geeklab build | Phase 4 |
| Major | Almost no page has a meta description, and the homepage description is a template placeholder. | 5 of 90 titled pages have a description. Homepage: “Practicing dentistry in city/state/region?” | ISDA staff | Phase 5 |
| Major | Organization schema and social tags are the shared state template, not Idaho. | og:site_name “State: ID - Idaho” on 162 fetches. Organization address, email, logo, and phone are empty strings. One page has an og:image. | ADA template | Phase 5 |
| Major | Two different ADA join destinations are live at once. | Join Now uses comSiteId a2E8V00000Ndf86UAB. Online Application 301s to comSiteId a2E8V00000gnkryUAA. “Join Idaho Dental” points at ada.org/renew. | ADA | Phase 4 |
| Major | Search is a header utility, not the front door. Primary tasks compete. | Desktop: small Search field. Phone: search is an icon. Hero is a cartoon “Renew Today” ad beside Join. Body repeats Join, Find a Dentist, and Events as equal buttons. | Sprout brand / Phase 2 | Phase 2 |
| Major | Pinch-zoom is disabled, and the phone view hides the task path. | Viewport maximum-scale=1.0. Lighthouse fails meta-viewport and target-size. At 390px the cookie banner covers the hero and the nav collapses. | ADA template | Phase 4 |
| Major | The public education library the RFP describes is not on the site. | Public Resources hub: Find a Dentist, clinics, Give Kids a Smile, special care, why see a dentist, FAQ, Facebook, fluoridation, and a COVID page. No emergency, oral cancer, anxiety, seniors, veterans, or Medicaid pages. | ISDA staff | Phase 2 |
| Minor | Heading structure is unreliable. | Homepage has no H1 (first heading is an H2). 15 content URLs have no H1, including Member Center, staff, fluoridation, and Dental Day. Events exposes three H1s. About exposes two. | ISDA staff | Phase 5 |
| Minor | Broken in-site links sit in the menus. | HTTP 404: meeting and event list, legislative dinners, annual-session hotel, member-center/join-renew, get-involved advocacy, between-patients. HTTP 403: /find-a-dentist. | ISDA staff | Phase 5 |
| Minor | Advocacy and on-demand CE stop at a login wall. | Legislative Priorities tells a signed-out visitor to log in for the 2026 PDF. On-demand CE is labeled “must be logged in”. | ISDA staff | Phase 2 |
Method
Content crawl started from the homepage, Member Center, Public Resources, Events, About, Classifieds, Join, and the three legal URLs. Asset handlers, images, and Sitefinity resource packages were skipped. Login and sign-out clones were removed from the counts below. Lab tests used the homepage, Public Resources, Dental Health FAQ, Join / Renew, Events, Member Center, and Accessibility. Five tasks were walked signed out: find a dentist, join, see upcoming CE, read an advocacy priority, find the office phone. The phone check used a 390 by 844 viewport.
User interface
The chrome is the ADA constituent template: navy wordmark, utility pills (Contact, Find a Dentist, Join/Renew, Login), a search slot, and a white menu. Homepage hero copy is real Idaho advocacy language. The adjacent panel is a cartoon-tooth “Renew Today” advertisement, and the page is tagged Advertisement in two more slots, including a Facebook follow box. Cookie consent sits on top of the hero. Body green (#339933) and button blue (#008FD5) are the template tokens, not a documented Idaho palette. The login control is still exposed to assistive tech as Salesforce_GL.
Recommendation, Phase 2 and Phase 3: make one primary action on the homepage, retire cartoon art as the hero, and replace template color and the Salesforce provider label. Sprout owns the visual system.
Information architecture
Primary nav is the org chart: Member Center, Events and CE, Public Resources, Classifieds, About, Join / Renew, Welcome. Audience links (Dentists, Members, Patients, Foundation, IDPAC) appear only after the hero, under “How can we help?”. Search exists, and on a phone it is collapsed behind an icon. It is not the “What are you looking for?” gateway in the RFP.
| Task | Clicks from home | Result |
|---|
| Find a dentist | 1 | 301 to findadentist.ada.org |
| Join | 1 | Join / Renew page, then off-site to ADA |
| Upcoming CE | 1 | Events hub. On-demand CE is login-only |
| Advocacy priority | 2 | Page loads. 2026 document is login-only |
| Office phone | 1 | Contact Us shows phone and street address |
Recommendation, Phase 2: keep these five tasks, and put search and those tasks ahead of the department names.
Mobile
At 390px the utility pills wrap to two rows, the menu becomes a hamburger, and search becomes an icon. The cartoon renew ad stacks above the advocacy headline. The cookie banner covers the headline and the Join button. maximum-scale=1 blocks pinch-zoom. Lighthouse fails target size on the mobile run. The performance scores below are the mobile medians. Desktop is faster, so this is a small-screen problem.
Accessibility
Automated scores sit between 79 and 84 on mobile. Homepage failures that repeated in the template: contrast on the cookie button and a carousel slide, headings that skip levels, visible labels that do not match accessible names, tabindex greater than 0, and the zoom lock. Image alt did not fail on the homepage sample. Not tested: PDFs, the 2026 priorities file, dues checkout, and anything behind Salesforce login. A full WCAG 2.2 AA audit needs those surfaces plus a manual screen-reader pass.
Recommendation, Phase 4: remove maximum-scale, fix the cookie and carousel contrast, and give the homepage a single H1 before any visual redesign.
SEO
The homepage scores 85 because it has a description and a title. Inner templates score 77. The description it has is the wrong sentence. Five titled pages in the content set have any meta description. Canonicals are present on the pages that returned HTML. Indexing is the larger failure: robots.txt is HTML, and the sitemap URL is an HTML 404 that still returns HTTP 200, so a crawler can treat error pages as real documents. Twelve URLs share the title “Society | American Dental Association”, which is the soft-404 title.
Recommendation, Phase 5: publish a real robots.txt and XML sitemap, write a description per indexable URL, fill Organization schema with the Boise address and phone, and set og:site_name to the association name.
AI readiness
| RFP question | Public answer |
|---|
| How do I become a dentist in Idaho? | No page found |
| How do I renew my dental license? | No page found |
| What are Idaho CE requirements? | CE pages exist. No requirements answer on the public FAQ |
| How do I join ISDA? | Answered on /join-renew |
| How do I find a dentist? | Redirects to the ADA directory |
| How do I start a practice in Idaho? | No page found |
| What advocacy issues affect Idaho dentistry? | Page exists. The 2026 list is behind login |
Organization JSON-LD is on the pages and its fields are blank. That is the opposite of an answer engine can quote. Dental Health FAQ is a real URL. The word COVID appears on it. It is not a set of question pages with schema.
Recommendation, Phase 2: write the seven questions as their own URLs, with a one-paragraph answer above any login, and fill the Organization schema in Phase 5.
Performance
Third parties on the homepage include Google Tag Manager GTM-MLZDBZDM, GA4 G-NHNGNPZGWD, Azure Application Insights, the Facebook SDK, Google Fonts (Open Sans), and ad slots. Total blocking time stays under 130 ms, so script long-tasks are not the story. On mobile, that largest element is what arrives late. The same template’s desktop LCP is about 1.5 to 3.2 seconds. Cumulative layout shift is 0.107 on every page in the sample, which points at the shared chrome (cookie bar or carousel), not at one article.
| Template |
Mobile perf |
Mobile LCP |
Desktop perf |
Desktop LCP |
A11y |
SEO |
| Homepage | 57 | 9.1 s | 60 | 1.5 s | 81 | 85 |
| Public Resources | 60 | 7.3 s | 59 | 1.6 s | 83 | 77 |
| Dental Health FAQ | 57 | 9.3 s | 57 | 1.8 s | 81 | 77 |
| Join / Renew | 61 | 7.4 s | 56 | 1.8 s | 81 | 77 |
| Events | 59 | 8.0 s | 52 | 2.3 s | 79 | 77 |
| Member Center | 56 | 9.6 s | 44 | 3.2 s | 79 | 77 |
| Accessibility | 63 | 5.5 s | 56 | 1.8 s | 84 | 77 |
Mobile figures are medians of three Lighthouse runs. Desktop is one run. Accessibility column is the mobile median. Best-practices was 77 on every mobile run. The 9.1 s homepage figure above is the same median, shown again here beside the other templates.
Recommendation, Phase 4: treat mobile LCP as a release gate. Compress the hero, stop the carousel from being the largest element, and load ads and Facebook after the headline. Do not wait for a redesign to fix a 9 second mobile LCP.
Content
Of 90 titled content URLs, 71 titles are unique, 15 have no H1, and 9 have more than one H1. Twenty-five are under 400 words of extracted text, which includes thin utility pages and some real sections. Confirmed gaps: OSHA and HIPAA is labeled “coming soon” on the homepage. Newsletter naming on the homepage is “Dental Dose”. A guessed student career URL was not in the crawl. Broken menu targets are listed in the register. Staff, About, classifieds, awards, and Dental Day do have substantial text.
Recommendation, Phase 2 for what to write, Phase 5 for titles, H1s, and the 404s. Do not migrate the soft-404s.
Member experience, public shell
Signed-out visitors can open Member Center, membership benefits, classifieds, component societies, IDIA, the foundation, and the join story. They cannot finish directory, profile, newsletter archive, board, delegates, official documents, or on-demand CE. Those items are in the menu and route through LoginExternalProvider. The join page is the strongest public member flow: it states the sequence (verify license, receive a dues statement, membership activates after payment, then a welcome packet). The buttons underneath that story disagree with each other, which is the two community ids plus ada.org/renew.
Recommendation: ask ADA which comSiteId is Idaho before any new join button is designed. Keep the join story. Rebuild the buttons so “Join” and “Renew” cannot point at the same renew URL.
Public resources
| RFP topic | On the public hub |
|---|
| Find a dentist | Present. Redirects to ADA |
| Children / Give Kids a Smile | Present |
| Community clinics | Present |
| Special care | Present. No H1 |
| Why see a dentist | Present |
| Fluoride | Present as a statement. No H1 |
| FAQ | Present. Not an answer center |
| Preventive, emergency, oral cancer, anxiety, seniors, veterans, Medicaid | Absent |
Recommendation, Phase 2: one Public Education Resource Center. Do not add nine thin pages. Start with the seven RFP questions that have no answer, and keep Find a Dentist as a link to ADA.
Integrations observed
These are rails seen on the public site. They are not an API test.
| Rail | What the public site does |
|---|
| Login | Sitefinity LoginExternalProvider, including a control named Salesforce_GL |
| Join | myaccount.ada.org uma-promo-join-process, two comSiteId values |
| Renew and dues | ada.org/renew, and the dues page loads Fonteva, Stripe, and PayPal |
| Find a Dentist | 301 from the public-resources path to findadentist.ada.org |
| Events | Sitefinity pages. Component form offers a Google Sheet, email RSVP, or a paid registration link |
| On-demand CE | Login wall. System behind it was not opened |
Not in this report
GA4 and Search Console numbers need the analytics invite. GTM GTM-MLZDBZDM and GA4 G-NHNGNPZGWD are present. What they record is unknown. Directory search, dues payment, profile edit, newsletter archives, and on-demand courses need a member login. PDF accessibility was not tested. Peer sites were opened only to see the template: wsda.org and oregondental.org serve the same Sitefinity constituent chrome. They were not audited. www.idahodental.org did not resolve. idahodental.org without www redirects to www.theisda.org.