Big changes for website monitors

We didn’t just change our name today – we’ve rolled out a tonne of new features for all our Silktide Monitor customers.

Introducing actions and lessons

Every test now comes with a prioritized list of actions you should complete to increase your score. You can even see how much you’ll get from each action:

Actions also explain who is the best person to tackle the action – such as a content editor, or a web developer – and give a rough estimate of how difficult the action is likely to be. Many actions also track your progress at resolving them over time:

Some actions now come with built-in lessons, which are short videos and articles recommended to help you understand and complete your actions.

Improved spelling test

Spelling errors are now classified as misspellings and potential misspellings. A misspelling is very likely to be wrong (e.g. using the word “colour” for US English). A potential misspelling was not recognized, but could still be correct – for example compound brand words like “SteelBrick”.

You can now see a brief excerpt of where a spelling error occurred, even before you view it on the page. When a spelling error appears in a hidden area of the page, we do more to explain where the error is, for example saying “inside page title”.

Each spelling error is now highlighted separately, if it is repeated on a page.

Improved broken links test

The broken links test now checks for named links to parts of a page, e.g. if you linked to page.html#news and #news did not exist on page.html, that is now detected as an error. These links to parts of a broken page at least take the user to a page, and so are not scored as severely as a normal broken link.

Broken links are now shown as a summary of the links themselves, and you can click to see the page(s) where that link occurs.

Improved accessibility (WCAG 2.1)

We’ve massively expanded our accessibility area, which now includes lessons, actions, a guidelines breakdown and more.

We now test WCAG 2.1, the latest version of the global accessibility standard. WCAG 2.1 introduces requirements that affect your mobile design, and Silktide uses pioneering technology to be able to test layouts meet these requirements automatically.

New scoring and increased transparency

We’ve completely reworked our scoring system to be simpler and easier to understand.

The major sections of your website are broken into 4 scores: Content, SEO, Accessibility, and User Experience. You can view a complete breakdown of each score, and see the exact checkpoints that contribute to them, right down to the individual page issues.

The website as a whole gains a new Overall score. Like the other summaries, you can now view exactly how this is calculated, and see what actions you need to perform to improve it.

And so much more

Almost every test and check we offer has been refined for our latest release. If you have any questions or would like us to talk you through the changes, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with your account manager.