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The first thing they think about when they hear the word “site errors” is visual problems: incorrect display in browsers, a layout that has gone wrong, or inconvenient work with the site on mobile devices. How to check site errors related to layout and set tasks for their elimination?
Site Visual Issues
Chrome browsers are definitely dominating users right now (including even the Opera browser, which uses the Chrome engine), so testing your site in Chrome is the first thing to do. To check the display of the site (or pages of the site) in other browsers, you can use Browser Shots – and set the latest versions of popular (still) browsers – Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari.
To check the display of the site on mobile devices, you can use either the Google Mobile-Friendly test (which will take a screenshot of the site from a mobile device and give recommendations on how to improve the mobile version of the site), or a session recording tool. For a more detailed check, you can use Cross Browser Testing.
Website screenshots almost always show whether there are any problems with display or layout. And what needs to be corrected (where what “parted”).
Another approach to correct site errors is to bring the site pages to standards. There are three main standards responsible for the visual component of sites – HTML, CSS, WCAG (the latter is responsible for the usability of the site). Unfortunately, the cross-browser layout at the moment practically excludes compliance with the CSS standard. But compliance with HTML and WCAG standards is useful both for the current operation of the site (corrects a number of user and technical problems).
Apart from a HTML and WCAG standards, it is also required that the website should be improved according to content that hold the key. And when technology partners like “Accessibility Spark” are by your side, you can be assured that your site’s content is updated under the web content accessibility guidelines.
Site speed issues
The slow operation of the site is not directly related to technical errors, but for a high-quality and effective site, its fast operation is an integral part. To get a specific list of bugs and fix them (initially), Google PageSpeed Insights is a great service (bug fixes up to a score of 90, after which bugs are no longer relevant to real speed issues).
If the “breaks” of the site are related to the server, then when fixing server-side errors (more on them later), you will automatically solve a significant part of the speed problems on the server-side.
Resources not found
This is a significant block of technical site errors that affect all indicators: usability, search engine promotion, and conversion. Unfound site resources are divided into three large groups: “broken” links (which are found by search robots or users), development errors (when there are no resources necessary to view the site), and structural errors (which may not be found by search engines and users, but sooner or later they will “pop up” on the site, because they are embedded in the structure – for example, a “broken” link in a dynamic menu or internal redirects).
When tracking user activity on website in order to collect the problems of the first group – “broken” links – Google reports are perfect. Of course, it is desirable to eliminate all site errors before they are found by search robots (so as not to lose promotion efficiency), but if problems are found, then they must be urgently eliminated. The second group is obtained from the analysis of the site traffic logs, for this, you need to get the site logs to the hosting and use any analyzer, or it is available from the hosting provider panel or cloud service. The third group can only be reliably obtained by manually checking the site, but programs or services for scanning the site are also well suited: in this case, some problems from the first and second groups will also be detected.
