Top of page

Quality Assurance Quick Tips

We all get busy. On some days more than others, and when that happens it sure would be nice to have tips or reminders on how to take care of some of those tasks that are lurking on our to-do list just a bit faster.

Quality assurance issues on our sites aren’t going away anytime soon, and they are something we need to address sooner than later. To help with that, here are some tips (and reminders) on how to make fixing those issues – and understanding what to do in certain cases – a bit easier and less stressful.

Broken Links

Reminders

  • When you’re working on fixing broken links, make sure you check both the Confirmed broken links and Links to review categories.
  • Always start with the Confirmed broken links (404: Not found). These are confirmed to be broken and need to be fixed now.
  • If you have a lot of confirmed broken links, check how many pages the broken link(s) appear on. It’s a good idea to start with any link that is broken on multiple pages.
  • If you have a broken link that is outside your content area that you are unable to fix (i.e. in the WFU global header or footer), please submit a digital request form.
  • Never dismiss a link permanently unless you know for a fact that it will never be an actual broken link. If you’re not sure, reach out and ask.

Tips

  • We already said that you should always fix 404 issues first, but what about the other links? While you should always check each link to see if it’s broken or not, here’s a quick guide as to what some of the other error messages you may see mean:
    • 400: Bad Request: This response means that server could not understand the request due to invalid syntax.
    • 403: Forbidden: The client does not have access rights to the content so the server is not allowing access to the requested response. (i.e. the content is behind a password protected site)
    • 500: Internal Server Error: There’s a problem on the website’s server, preventing it from fulfilling a request
    • 503: Service Unavailable: The server is not ready to handle the request. Common causes are a server that is down for maintenance or overloaded.
    • Timed Out: This response is sent on an idle connection by some servers, even without any previous request by the client. (i.e. The page wouldn’t load, but it still may have been able to connect to the server)

      While it’s not uncommon to see many links that appear in the Links to review to be fine, you always want to check them to verify that, and if one or more happen to be broken, to fix them ASAP.

      You can learn more about broken links. and HTTP statuses on Siteimprove’s Status Codes resource page.
  • If you find a link on your site that isn’t broken but is flagged as such, the best thing to do is ignore it. The next time Siteimprove crawls your site it should disappear so long as the issues has resolved itself by that time. If it still shows up, let’s say about a week later but it still works, then you can dismiss the link temporarily.
    • To do this, check the link you want to dismiss and select Dismiss link (for now) from the dropdown above the table.
  • While you should always fix every broken link on your site as soon as time permits, you can refer to your QA Dashboard to see what links would improve your QA score the most when fixed. In this case, look under Fix these Quality Assurance issues to improve your DCI score section for your broken links. You can see what points you can gain if you fix them. Click on the link and it will take you to a screen to fix those links.

Misspellings and Words to review

Reminders

  • Always start with Misspellings. While not all the words that are flagged will actually be misspellings, these are the ones that Siteimprove thinks are the most important ones to look at.
  • You may find more words flagged in Words to review, which is not uncommon since Siteimprove will flag anything it thinks is misspelled, not just what may actually be. Make sure you look at both categories at the same time and fix any issues in one sitting if possible.
  • Any word you approve will not show up again during Siteimprove’s crawl of your site. When you approve it you’re basically adding it to our database of approved words. Make sure you only approve words you know for sure are correct.
  • Misspelled words and what you fix/approve are isolated to individual sites. Fixing or approving a word on one site will not affect any other sites on the wfu.edu domain.

Tips

  • The most efficient way of cleaning up your misspellings depend on how many words were flagged.
    • If you have a few, it may be easier to go one-by-one and correct them if they need correcting.
    • If you have many, it may be better to select all the words and then uncheck just those that you either know are broken or are unsure about. Once all the words you need to look at and/or fix are unchecked, you can approve everything else. After you do that, you will be left with just those that need attention.
  • You can quickly approve a word that is correct by clicking the thumbs up icon under Decision for site. If you have multiple words you’d like to approve at once, make sure they’re all checked and click the Mark as approved word blue button located at the top of the table.
  • It’s a good idea to look at how many pages a certain word appears on and fix that first. If it appears on multiple pages that may mean it could be in your site navigation or somewhere else in your template.

Still need some help?

Additional Siteimprove trainings will be offered throughout the year, so make sure you submit our Siteimprove request form and let us know if you’d like to sign up for the next training. If you have a question or two, feel free to reach out and I’ll be happy to help!

Recent Posts

Archives