How does Silktide count pages?

How Silktide counts a page can be deceptively complex. This page explains the finer details.

Mobile and desktop pages

Silktide attempts to test a website in both mobile and desktop devices. If a website is limited to say 100 pages, Silktide could test up to 100 desktop pages and 100 mobile pages. 

This is usually what you would expect. It does mean that Silktide does, by one interpretation, download 200 pages to test 100 pages. This is because it has downloaded each page twice, in both mobile and desktop.

Duplicate pages

Silktide automatically detects and ignores pages with identical content to another page. Silktide always considers the page with the shorter web address the ‘original’ version of the page, and tests only that.

For example, many websites might have pages like example.com and example.com/home which are identical. Silktide would detect this, and only test the example.com page.

Where they occur, duplicate pages will be highlighted in your report. Duplicate content is a basic SEO issue and should be avoided where possible.

Frames and iframes

Silktide downloads frames and iframes, but considers each frame to be a separate page.

Download limits

Silktide attempts to find the number of unique pages it has been limited to. Some badly behaved websites can produce an infinite amount of duplicate pages, or redirections, or non-functioning URLs which would keep Silktide searching forever.

To prevent this, Silktide limits itself to 4 downloads per desired page. This means if you are testing up to 1,000 pages, that Silktide will make up to 4,000 downloads before stopping automatically.

If your download limit is being reached, and not all of your desired pages are being found, you should consider defining rules to exclude specific URLs. If you are able to exclude sections of the site that are infinite, you should be able to stay within your download limit and find all of your real pages.