At the beginning of each month, CALS/LAS website owners receive a Matomo Report by email, giving an update on the analytics and health of their sites. The goal of the email is to serve as a reminder to website editors to log in to their Siteimprove dashboards at least once a month and work to correct some errors that will improve the overall health of their website.
Editors can click the SiteImprove link directly from the email to log in, or they can access SiteImprove via their Microsoft dashboard. If you need help adding an app, follow these instructions loosely.
Be sure that your Siteimprove tile in looks like the one on the left:
The dashboard report gives editors a quick look at the three main action scores: accessibility, broken links, and misspellings; however, the real breakdown comes below.
To help our website editors with a lot on their plates, we've broken down the report into sections and encourage those who can to take it one improvement at a time! Scroll to the corresponding month and get to work!
Broken Links (January, May, September)
Missing Alternate Text (February, June, October)
Misspellings (March, July, November)
Properly Sized Images (April, August, December)
Broken Links
Broken links send visitors to a page that no longer exists. These have a negative effect on SEO and your visitor's experience! This Siteimprove report will help identify internal and external broken links across your website.
To fix your broken links, navigate to your dashboard and scroll to Broken Links - Details. Find the Pages column and drop down the arrow next to the number of pages the broken link is present on. This will reveal a new box shown below in green. From here, use the arrow to go to the corresponding page and find the broken link. Replace or remove the broken link. Remember to save the page.
Missing Alternate Text
For most people, the alternate text description is not something you think twice or even once about. But for the visually impaired or blind, the alternate text helps to understand the context of images placed on a webpage. For a site to be considered accessible, every contextual image should include an alternate text attribute describing the purpose of the image. The exception to this rule is decorative images whose only purpose is "for looks." Leaving this attribute blank will hide an image from those using assistive technology.
To fix the missing alt text, click the arrow to navigate to the page featuring an image with missing alt text. Edit the page to add the alternate text. Write short and descriptive text that will tell a user who can't see the image exactly what it features.
Misspellings
We all know the feeling of being in the zone generating content. It's easy to slip up and miss a spelling mistake. Still, these are important errors to correct! Misspellings can hurt your website's credibility and cause a visitor to lose trust. Siteimprove is the extra spell-checker you need to improve your site's content!
To fix misspellings navigate to your dashboard and find the Misspellings report. Drop down the pages arrow to view the pages containing the misspelled word. Click the arrow box to visit each page. Edit the page to correct the misspelling and save your work.
Properly Sized Images
There's nothing worse when searching the web than trying to access a website that won't load. There's generally no reason that images should be larger than 1 MB on a site. Images of this size or larger noticeably slow down your site's speed. This Siteimprove report will find all the images on your site that are larger than 1 MB and notify you where they are located.
To find the pages with the improperly sized images, find the Images larger than 1 MB report, drop down the arrow next to the referring pages, and click the arrow box to visit the page with the large image. If you have the original image, make sure it is uploaded using the dimensions it will be displayed at (600x350, 600x600, etc.). If the image is still too large, try compressing it using a tool such as TinyPNG. Once the file is less than 1 MB, re-upload it to your site and save your work. Read more about how to resize your images.
After putting in the work to improve your website's health, it's natural that you want to see an updated dashboard with that green winking face! Don't worry; your website is re-crawled every five days. If waiting for the first of the month is unbearable, you can check back then!