3 Quality Checks To Do On Your Website
The other night I was reviewing some membership plugins. I was inside the member area of this membership plugin when I clicked on a link that was supposed to take me to a tutorial I needed. And I landed on a 404 error page. Basically, I didn’t get what I was looking for.
This is what happens when you have a broken link on your website. Visitors click the link then land on what is called a 404 page – 404 represents the type of error it is.
And this is just one example of the kind of quality issues that can ruin a visitors experience when they come to your website.
My question to you is: do you have a plan in place to check for these kind of quality issues on YOUR site?
It’s okay if you don’t. Most bloggers (and even a lot of web developers) don’t either. Between writing content for your website, servicing clients, and living your life, it’s kind of hard to find time for quality checks.
Anyway, these are the three quality checks I recommend you do on your site. Why not plan an hour to fix look at and fix these this week?
1. Broken Links
2. Broken images
3. 404 pages not redirected
Who has the time to spend looking through page after page for broken links and images?
None of us.
However, a great little plugin called Broken Link Checker does all this work for you.
Broken Link checker is a free plugin available in the WordPress.org plugin repository. Find it and install it. Once activated, you can run it and the plugin will dig through all the pages, posts, and links on your site.
When the crawler finishes, Broken Link Checker will give you a report of all the broken links found.
You’ll even see broken images in the list.
Whoo hoo! I love it when you get so much value out of a plugin!
Now what you can do next is visit each page and fix the link. Here is the exact text from the plugin description describing what you can do with found broken links:
“There are several actions associated with each link. They show up when you move your mouse over to one of the links listed the aforementioned tab –
- “Edit URL” lets you change the URL of that link. If the link is present in more than one place (e.g. both in a post and in the blogroll), all occurrences of that URL will be changed.
- “Unlink” removes the link but leaves the link text intact.
- “Not broken” lets you manually mark a “broken” link as working. This is useful if you know it was incorrectly detected as broken due to a network glitch or a bug. The marked link will still be checked periodically, but the plugin won’t consider it broken unless it gets a new result.
- “Dismiss” hides the link from the “Broken Links” and “Redirects” views. It will still be checked as normal and get the normal link styles (e.g. a strike-through effect for broken links), but won’t be reported again unless its status changes. Useful if you want to acknowledge a link as broken/redirected and just leave as it is.
You can also click on the contents of the “Status” or “Link Text” columns to get more info about the status of each link.”
That’s really useful.
Generally speaking, using Broken Link Checker alone is a good enough quality assurance check on your site.
But if you have ever migrated your site to a new platform (I.e. Drupal to WordPress), changed hosts, or rebuilt your website, then you may have a bunch of broken links.
Now, I want to introduce you to another cool plugin that you can use to make sure you are redirecting broken links to their correct pages. The plugin – another Free one – is called Redirection. Search for it in the WordPress.org plugin repository.
Redirection is great for mass redirection of links. I bring it up because you may have a site, or maybe a client, who have a big blog or website that they migrated from one platform to another. It’s a pretty common occurrence.
I migrated one of my blogs from Blogger to WordPress a couple of years ago. There were over 100 posts on the blog. The Redirection plugin definitely was a life saver in terms of getting all those posts to redirect easily so I didn’t lose my search engine rankings nor did I cause a bunch of broken links for my visitors.
Anyway, suspect that the broken link I clicked in that membership portal the other day was probably one of those situations where the tutorial got outdated and they made a new one. Hey, I get it. That happens to me with my sites too.
Now you know a simple method for running some key quality checks on your site and fixing the issues without having to spend more than an hour doing it.