Does Website Usability Impact Webometrics Ranking of University?

Academic Website is one of the internet-based information media used by educational institutions such as universities, institutes, schools, and other non-formal institutions. The general information contained in the academic website includes study programs, scholarly activities, academic achievements, study plans, academic calendars, and academic information systems. Webometrics is a system that provides an assessment of all the best universities in the world through the university's website. Webometric ranks more than 22,000 Universities around the world. There are three components that become the leading indicators of this Webometrics assessment, namely: visibility/impact, transparency/openness, and excellence. In addition, usability can be exploited to provide an evaluation of the website's quality. Usability refers to how easy it is to use the interface of a website. Usability can be measured by using five criteria, which are navigation, personalization, download speed, accessibility, and ease of use. This work investigates the impact of website usability on webometrics ranking. The sample of this research is 75 websites of regular universities in Indonesia. For data collection, several research instruments were used in the form of an online checker. The data was then analyzed by exploiting Structural Equation Modeling. The result shows the ranking of university websites based on usability criteria gives significant results similar to the ranking results with three standards released by Webometrics.