How to Automatically Scan Your Website for Errors
Running a website is hard. In addition to creating compelling and useful content that people want to read, you also have to keep on top of dead links, spelling mistakes, and grammar. But luckily, there are tools available to help make this easier.
SiteInspector is a free and open-source app you can use to scrape your website, and check for issues which will turn readers off and send you tumbling down the search rankings. Here’s how to use it to automatically scan your site for errors.
Why Use SiteInspector to Scan Your Website?
It’s easy and cheap tocreate your own website, and you canrun a website from a Raspberry Pior an old laptop. But it can be much harder to keep on top of maintaining your website.
Visitors come to your site to read what you’ve written, or to buy your product, or to look at your pictures. Unless you’re spewing stream-of-consciousness onto the page in the style of Irvine Walsh or James Joyce, you want your writing to be clean and coherent, with a standardized spelling.
Likewise, your grammar should be correct, and there should be no broken internal or outbound links. If your website doesn’t live up to this, visitors won’t be as confident in your attention-to-detail, and might leave.
Worse still, you’ll take an SEO hit—meaning your site will appear further down the page in search results, and you may not have any visitors at all.
Going through your site page-by-page, and manually checking links, spelling, and grammar, is time-consuming, and tedious. SiteInspector takes the hard work out of spotting errors, and presents you with a summarized list of possible improvements.
How to Install SiteInspector
SiteInspector will run on Linux, macOS, or on Windows throughWindows Subsystem for Linux(WSL).
The app is packaged as a Docker image, and you’ll need to have Docker and Docker Compose installed. If you don’t have these already, read our guide onhow to install Docker and Docker Compose.
The easiest way to install SiteInspector is to use the following command:
This command will execute a script which will, in turn, fetch a Docker Compose file, then issue the appropriate instruction to bring Docker Compose up. Docker Compose will set up containers and make the app accessible on port 808 of your local machine.
After the first time you run SiteInspector, you can start it by running:
How to Use SiteInspector to Check Your Website for Errors
Once SiteInspector is up and running, open a web browser and into the address bar, type:localhost:808.
You’ll need to create an admin account with an email address and password. Don’t worry—these are for local authentication only, and won’t be sent to the developers unless you decide to subscribe to newsletters after hitting theLet’s Go!button.
Next, clickAdd Website, then enter the URL of the website you want to scan. Don’t clickSubmitjust yet. Instead, pressConfigureto expand a menu where you can fine-tune scan options.
Exclude Pathallows you to specify paths which shouldn’t be scanned.
If you’re employing a structure which separates content into years, and you already know that content before 2022 is flawless and error-free, you’ll want to exclude paths including “/2021”, “/2020”, and so on.
Alternatively, you can set a value inStart Path. This instructs SiteInspector to start its scan using a particular path as its root. You can also configure custom tests—you may want to check whether you’ve left any placeholder “Lorem Ipsum” text for instance.
Next up, you can flip toggle switches for whether you want SiteInspector to check for spelling and grammar, broken links, images or scripts.
To put SiteInspector to the test, we ran it against MakeUseOf—checking for spelling and grammar errors, along with broken links.
Starting our test at around 6AM EST, we found that SiteInspector tore through MUO at a pace of around 25,000 pages per hour for the first hour, before slowing as the continental US woke up and went online.
The next 80,000 plus pages took around 10 hours. For reference, MUO has more than 85,000 articles, and well in excess of 100,000 individual pages.
While the above statistics don’t look great, MakeUseOf is a highly technical site, and includes a lot of jargon, code snippets, and other factors which can contribute to the perceived error rate. That said, SiteInspector did allow us to catch multiple spelling issues which fell through the editorial net.
Each page containing an issue has its own report section, with broken links shown at the bottom. When you’ve fixed the issues on each page, you can clickResolved. The page report will collapse, and you can move onto the next one.
If you need help to fix the errors, click on theShare Reportbutton on the report tab. This will generate a link which you can send to your collaborators, assigning them either an editor or viewer role.
Bear in mind that if you’re sharing with people on your local network, you’ll need to replacelocalhostwith your local IP address. If your coworkers aren’t on the same network as you, considerhosting on a VPS.
SiteInspector Makes It Easy to Fix Errors on Your Website
With SiteInspector, you can quickly identify and fix errors on your website. Of course, it’s better if you don’t have any errors to begin with. While you can’t make fixes to these problems through SiteInspector, you can take steps to improve your own spelling and grammar.
If you’re looking for a spelling and grammar checker but don’t want to download any apps or extensions, here are the six best options to choose from.
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