Proofreading a website

Three passes, not one

Reading for facts, for clarity and for typos uses different attention. Attempting all three at once means each is done badly, which is why a page can be read repeatedly and still carry an obvious error.

Do them in order of cost. A wrong price or a lapsed credential is expensive; an unclear paragraph loses customers quietly; a typo is embarrassing and rarely more than that.

Separating them also makes each pass fast. A facts pass on a page takes minutes because you are looking for one class of thing rather than everything at once.

Do them on different days where you can. Distance does more for a proofread than effort does, and a page reread an hour after writing is read almost entirely from memory.

Pass one: facts

Every number, date, name, credential, price, phone number and address — each one is something an answer engine may repeat without your qualifications. Open the source for each one rather than recognizing it, because recognition is exactly how a wrong figure survives.

Check anything that could have changed since the page was written. Hours, coverage, services offered, staff named and anything with a year in it.

Our page on citable claims covers what each figure needs beside it. A fact with no source is either your own record, which you confirm, or an import, which you trace.

Pass two: clarity

Read the page as somebody who has never seen it. The question is not whether it is correct but whether it is understood, and those come apart more often than people expect.

Read it aloud. Every stumble marks a place a reader would have slowed, and the mouth finds these far faster than the eye does.

Our page on plain language covers what to change once you find them, and most of the fixes are shorter sentences and ordinary words.

Pass three: the mechanics

Spelling, punctuation, consistent capitalization and consistent terminology. A checker catches most of it and misses the ones that matter: correctly spelled wrong words.

Watch for the trade-specific pairs a checker cannot judge, and for your own business name being spelled two ways on one site, which is commoner than it sounds.

Keep the spelling convention consistent across the whole site. Mixed conventions read as carelessness even to readers who could not name what is wrong.

What to check that is not words

The list below is what a text-focused proofread misses entirely, and several of these cost more than any typo would.

Check the page on a phone as part of the pass. Text that wraps awkwardly, a heading that breaks across three lines and a button that falls below the fold are all faults a desktop read never surfaces.

• Every link goes where it says
• Every form actually delivers
• Every image has alt text that describes it
• The phone number is tappable on a phone
• Prices and hours match everywhere they appear
• Nothing is left saying coming soon
• The year in the footer is current

Reading your own writing

You cannot proofread your own work well, because you read what you meant rather than what you wrote. Everybody has this problem and experience does not remove it.

Change the conditions to break the familiarity. Read it on a different device, at a different size, or printed. Reading backwards sentence by sentence works for mechanics.

Better still, have somebody else read it. Ten minutes from a person who has never seen the page finds more than an hour of your own attention.

After launch, on a schedule

Proofreading is not a pre-launch event. Prices drift, staff change, services are dropped, and the errors that appear later are the expensive kind rather than the embarrassing kind.

Put the facts pass on a schedule and leave the other two for when a page is edited. Our page on keeping content current covers the routine.

And re-check after any redesign. Template changes move text into places nobody reread, which is where a stale line survives a rebuild and reappears in public.