The Devil Is In The Details: Boosting Your Australian Web Awards (AWA) Web Development Score

The  Australian Web Awards (AWA) development discipline is one of the most technical and unforgiving in the judging lineup – and for good reason. Behind every great-looking website is a codebase that either holds up under scrutiny or quietly reveals the shortcuts taken to get it live. 

In this blog, we share what AWA development judges are actually looking for, and how to make sure your entry gives them nothing to find fault with. 

What is ‘web development’?

Web development is the technical craft behind how a website is built, functions, and performs. It’s everything that happens beneath the surface of the design: the code, the architecture, the speed, the security, and the way a site behaves across devices and browsers. 

In short, if design is how a site looks and feels, development is what makes it actually work.

What do AWA design judges look for? 

The gap between a good entry and a great one is rarely about creative ambition: it's about finishing the job. Performance, clean code, security, and functional forms are all within every developer's control, so entries that score the highest in the awards are the ones where nothing is left unfinished. 

"At Humaan, holistic best practice isn’t optional,” explains Jay Hollywood, Founder and CEO of Humaan, 2025’s Best In Show winner for Development. “We prioritise quality over simply getting something out the door.”

“We set clear success criteria upfront, make considered architectural decisions, and apply rigorous testing throughout. Our pre-launch QA process is comprehensive (akin to a pilot’s checklist), where every interaction is validated, every edge case accounted for, and nothing is left to chance. This ensures the end product doesn’t just function, but performs, scales, and stands up to real scrutiny.”

That’s what sets a winning entry apart: attention to detail. Our judges not only recognise it, but score it highly. Here’s what that attention to detail looks like from a judging perspective and why it matters. 

1. Performance that actually holds up under measurement

AWA judges aren't eyeballing load times – they're running PageSpeed Insights, checking Core Web Vitals, and measuring LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) in real numbers. Entries that drew the sharpest criticism had: 

• LCP scores of 7s, 10s, even 20s

• Image payloads of 2.5MB+, and

• Render-blocking resources pushing 900ms.

Sites that looked impressive visually lost points here because performance is treated as a craft indicator: if you care about your work, you optimise it.

Why it matters: Core Web Vitals are how Google and real users experience a site. A beautiful site that loads slowly is an incomplete one.

2. Code quality, cleanliness and intentionality

When our judges spot things like copy-pasted vendor files, commented-out code left in production, 30 custom fonts loaded unnecessarily, over 90 CSS files, and plugins stacked on plugins… it’s a dead giveaway that the code has been assembled, not written. On the other hand, higher scoring entries had tidy, clean code with little waste, often using NextJS (unfortunately many sites built on Elementor didn’t receive as warm a welcome).

Why it matters: Code quality reflects professional standards. It’s the difference between a site that was built with intention and one that was bolted together to a deadline.

3. Security fundamentals and form functionality

Web security is a hot topic nowadays and can be a costly one. In 2024, cyber security breaches cost Australian businesses an estimated $33 billion. That’s why our judges actively check security headers in every entry. 

If you’re building on WordPress, you can lose valuable points for missing CSRF/XSS headers. Same goes for exposed WordPress admin login pages and identifiable WP versions. Similarly, forms – one of the most basic interactive elements on a page – that yield blank submissions with no error feedback, validation that didn't trigger, and error messages not attached to their fields. 

Why it matters: A site that leaks its CMS version and skips security headers is a liability for the client. And broken forms aren't just a UX problem: they signal that the build wasn't properly tested.

5 ways to improve your web development score in the Australian Web Awards  

1. Fix your LCP before you submit your entry, not after.

Run PageSpeed Insights on your entry before you submit, on both mobile and desktop. If your LCP is above 2.5 seconds, you’ve got some work to do. The most common culprits that affect page speed are: 

• Uncompressed images (convert to WebP or AVIF)

• Render-blocking scripts, and 

• Enormous hero videos or 3D assets that weren't optimised for different viewports. 

You can use the srcset HTML attribute for responsive images so mobile users aren't downloading desktop-sized files.

2. Audit and clean your codebase like it's going to be reviewed line by line – because it is.

AWA judges consistently give high scores to entries with high JS/CSS utilisation and low waste, and flag low utilisation rates. For example, one entry had JS utilisation at 65%, meaning 35% of what was being loaded wasn't being used. 

Other tips? Remove commented-out code and eliminate unused CSS and JS. 

And ask yourself honestly: do I really need 30 custom fonts? Is that plugin necessary, or can it be done natively? And if you're on WordPress, consider whether WP Rocket or similar caching tools are masking underlying performance debt, rather than solving it. 

3. Lock down your security headers before submission

This is one of the highest-ROI fixes available because most AWA entries are missing them: add CSRF and XSS protection headers. 

Hide your WordPress version and restrict access to the admin login page (or at least move it from the default /wp-admin URL). You can run your site through securityheaders.com and work through the report which will take hours, not weeks, and our judges do notice both its absence and its presence. 

4. Test every form to find the breaking point

In previous years, forms have been a consistent failure point across AWA entries: broken validation, missing error messages, buttons that spin forever, errors that don't attach to the relevant field. Good form UX and validation logic signals that the site was actually user-tested, not just built and shipped. 

So how can you make sure your form won’t dock your AWA score for web development? Test it to destruction. Submit blank, submit with invalid data, submit with a phone number in an email field, submit twice, try it on mobile, try it in Firefox… you get the idea.

5. Clean up your console 

Before you submit, open DevTools and work through every warning, error, and leftover console.log that was never meant to survive development. Make sure you check whether jQuery and its migration scripts are genuinely needed or just inherited baggage nobody questioned. It takes twenty minutes, and it tells judges something no PageSpeed score can: that someone actually reviewed the build before it went live.

Building outstanding digital work begins before the first line of code 

If you’re a developer looking to learn from your peers and meet other web industry professionals, consider joining AWIA. Better work starts with a strong creative industry and we want you to join us in shaping the future of digital in Australia. 

Written by:
Dr Marion Piper Human, but also Creativity Coach & Copywriter

The Australian Web Awards recognise excellence across six core disciplines: Accessibility, Content, Design, Development, SEO, and User Experience. Subscribe to AWIA’s newsletter for 2026 awards updates, AWIA news and accessibility events as they’re released.