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Using the Siteimprove Dashboard Reports

Using the Siteimprove Dashboard Reports

Mar 07, 2022

Siteimprove is a service managed by the Information Technology - Client Services Webteam.  Siteimprove plays an important part of our web content management strategy by spidering the entire UNI website and identifying misspelled words, broken links, accessibility errors, areas for SEO improvement and page readability (using the Flesch-Kinkaid scale). 

ACCESSING YOUR WEBSITE DATA IN SITEIMPROVE

There are a couple of ways to review your website data in Siteimprove. First, you can be set up to receive weekly Siteimprove email reports, outlining broken links and misspelled words on your site. Our current priority is keeping our website as free of spelling errors and broken links as we can. Other data, such as accessibility, readability or SEO may be added to the report in the future, and is also available by request. 

You can receive more in-depth information by logging into the site and accessing a Departments Dashboard. There will be a link to log into Siteimprove in your email report, making it easy to access the Departments Dashboard. NOTE: Siteimprove does not use CatID authentication, your user name is your email address, and you can change your password by clicking on the Forgot Password? link on the log-in page.  You can log-in to Siteimprove at https://id.siteimprove.com/Account/Login 

USING YOUR SITEIMPROVE EMAIL REPORT

At the top of your Siteimprove email report are links to View Report and Log in to View Live Dashboard. Viewing the report as a live dashboard is the best way to review your website's information in Siteimprove.

Below the report links is the following information: 

  • Crawl Details: The date the last time your site was crawled by Siteimprove and the scheduled date of the next crawl. 


  • Broken Links: A list of pages containing broken links. 


  • Spellcheck: Spellcheck information is presented in three different ways.

    • Pages with Misspellings or Words to Review (Misspellings are words that are very likely spelled incorrectly, Words to Review may be misspelled, or may be a word the Siteimprove dictionary does not recognize, such as a name. 


    • A list of misspelled words on the site. 


    • A list of Words to Review for misspellings. 

Who receives the Siteimprove Email Reports

Siteimprove email reports will be sent to the person(s) identified during the site development process as having primary responsibility for the site. Other users may be added by sending a request to webteam@uni.edu.

 

BELOW: Using the Siteimprove Live Dashboard

USING THE SITEIMPROVE DASHBOARD

You have two ways to get to the Departments Dashboard. 

  1. Clicking on the Log-in to View Live Dashboard link in your weekly report will take you directly to the Departments Dashboard with your Siteimprove Group (your department) preselected. 


  2. Logging into the Siteimprove site at https://id.siteimprove.com/Account/Login (NOTE: Siteimprove does not use CatID authentication, your user name is your email address, and you can change your password by clicking on the Forgot Password? link on the log-in page.)


  3. Once you log in to Siteimprove, click on Dashboard in the dark menu to the left (see example ---→)


  4. If it's not the default, select Departments Dashboard from the dropdown list (see below) and select your department from the Groups dropdown list next to University of Northern Iowa (in the case below, Art is the department (Group) selected. 


  5. Once you are in Departments Dashboard and your department is selected, information about your department will populate the dashboard. 

Part One: Crawl Details and Broken Links

Crawl Details

This section shows the last time a site crawl was completed and when the next site crawl is scheduled to begin.

At the far right is a button to start a recrawl immediately. However, completing a crawl make take several days so you will not see immediate results once you initiate a recrawl.

It's generally best  to usually let the crawl happen automatically, if multiple departments would initiate a crawl around the same time rather than follow the schedule, it would slow down the progress on all of the crawls. 

Pages with Broken Links

The pages with Broken links section lists all pages on your site with one or more broken links. 

Clicking on the link to the page with the broken link (under the URL heading) will take you to a Siteimprove page displaying that web page with the broken link highlighted.  

The information under the heading Broken Links shows how many broken links there are on the page. Clicking the arrow will drop down a list of the broken links on the page. 

Page Report

After clicking on the link to the page with the broken link (under the URL heading) you are taken to the Page Report. The key areas of this report are:

  • The highlighted broken links (UNI Scholarship Application) highlighted in red. 


  • Clickable link to the web page on the UNI web site (#1 red box).


  • Recrawl button (#2 red box). Once you've fixed the link, you can ask Siteimprove to recrawl just that page. This usually doesn't take long, but if there is a heavy crawl load at that time, it may take longer than usual.

    Occasionally, Siteimprove will recrawl the page and not recognize right away that the link has been fixed. If you are confident that the link is working, I would ignore the false negative report from Siteimprove. It will pick it up as fixed in the next crawl. 

If there is more than one broken link on the page, they will all be highlighted in red, and they will also be listed on the left side of the page, under Occurrences on this page. 

If the broken link is a menu listing that is hidden under the + sign, the whole menu will be highlighted. You can identify the broken link under the Occurrences listing and then go to the web site to locate the broken link in the menu. 

Part Two: Misspelled Words and Words to Review

Pages with Misspellings or Words to Review

The section of the report lists all the pages that Siteimprove believes to contain a misspelled word or one that is potentially misspelled. The report has several important columns:

  • The URL column, as with the Broken Links report, shows the page in question. 

    Clicking on the link to the page (under the URL heading) will take you to a Siteimprove page displaying that web page with the misspelled or potentially misspelled words  highlighted.  


  • The Misspellings column shows the number of words on the page that Siteimprove is sure to be misspelled. 


  • The Words to Review column lists the number of words on the page that Siteimprove believes may be misspelled, but needs a review.  

You can also filter this part of the report to show only the pages with misspelled words, or only the pages with Words to Review. 

Misspellings

The Misspelling section shows the words Siteimprove feels are misspelled. You can access the sites that the words are located on to the far right, by clicking on the Pages number. If a word is OK, you can approve it by clicking on the Thumbs-up icon. 

Words to Review

  • Misspelling Probability is Siteimprove's gauge of how confident they are that the word is misspelled. 

  • You can access the sites that the words are located on to the far right, by clicking on the Pages number.

  • If a word is OK, you can approve it by clicking on the Thumbs-up icon.