Problem types

Broken images are much like broken links — pointing to resources that don't exist or that can't be shown. In many cases this results in an ugly frame with a small icon inside.

Perhaps the most commonly experienced problem on the web, and something you and your users surely have seen more than enough of.

Squidler finds links to missing or broken pages, both by identifying status codes and network errors, but also by looking at the content of the target pages, as many single-page applications and other dynamic rendering techniques don't respond with proper status codes.

With many programming languages, frameworks, and frontend rendering technologies, there's a risk that code snippets or other technical artifacts end up visible on the page. This can be a security risk, or just look bad or be confusing. Some common examples include:

• undefined and null
• NaN and Infinity
• [object Object]
• $\math\markup$
• {"json": "literals"}
• {{templates}}

If you intend to render code, make sure to wrap it in <code> tags to avoid false positives.

Pages with no internal links, i.e. links followed during Squidler tests, are considered dead ends. Pages that don't show any such links within a few seconds trigger this problem.

A common issue in responsive layouts, where images get squeezed out of proportion. It can also happen if you explicitly set incorrect dimensions that don't match the actual image dimensions.

Pages with missing titles negatively affect the user experience and SEO.

Blank pages, those without any visible text or media within a particular viewport, are considered problems. This is because they indicate a problem with the page, such as a missing resource, JavaScript errors, bad responsive layout, or other rendering issues.

Broken pages are those where the server responded with a status code indicating a bad request or server error. Squidler can also identify pages without such status codes, but where the content indicates a broken page.

When navigating from one page to another, and then navigating back, some pages fail to restore the scroll position to where user started. Especially o long pages with lots of scroll, like products listings or social media websites, this can be very confusing and frustrating for users.

This problem also applies forward navigating of the browser history.

When some elements that are too wide cause the layout to overflow, there's unindented horizontal scrolling. This often happens at certain viewport widths or specific dynamic content, like long words.

WHen there's a relatively small horizontal scrollability, Squidler considers it a problem.

Squidler uses Axe-core to test against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0, 2.1), Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, and other international standards of web accessibility.

Read more about the Axe-core rules on the ACT Rules website.

Squidler uses LanguageTool to extract and check for language-related problems. Multilingual pages are supported, and our HTML-aware extract eliminates a lot of false positives.