The kind of compliance a machine can check completely

Why it is the easy one

Accessibility needs somebody to judge whether alt text is true. Honest claims need somebody who knows your business. Privacy needs decisions about what you collect.

Web standards needs none of that. The markup either parses or it does not. The link either resolves or it returns an error.

That makes it the part you should never be failing, because there is no excuse involving judgment.

It is also the half that never improves on its own. Accessibility gets attention after a complaint and claims get attention after a dispute; malformed markup simply sits there being wrong.

What valid markup buys you

Browsers are forgiving and they guess when markup is broken. Different browsers guess differently, which is where strange layout bugs come from.

Assistive technology has less to work with when structure is malformed, and a search engine reading a broken page may extract the wrong thing.

Valid markup removes a whole class of problems that are otherwise investigated one browser at a time.

Titles and descriptions

Every page needs a title, and every title should differ from every other title on the site. The same applies to descriptions.

Duplicates are the most common standards failure on small sites, usually because a template filled them in and nobody edited.

It is also the failure with the most direct cost, because the title is what a person reads in a search result before deciding to click.

Duplicates are usually a template filling them in, which means the fix is one change rather than three hundred — the argument for finding them in bulk rather than page by page. See title tags.

Links and missing pages

Every internal link should resolve. Every removed page should either redirect somewhere sensible or return a proper missing page response.

The failure that matters most is a missing page that returns a normal response with no content. A search engine treats that as a real page and a visitor sees nothing.

Check this after every redesign, because that is when addresses change and old links stop working.

Structured data that is true

Structured data describes a page to a machine. A business, an article, a set of questions, a product.

It must describe what a visitor can actually see. Markup claiming a rating, an event or a price that does not appear on the page is the most common abuse in this area and risks losing the feature entirely.

Keep it generated from the same content the page displays, so the two cannot drift apart.

The rule is that a visitor must be able to see what the markup claims. Rating markup with no reviews on the page is the most common abuse in this area and the fastest way to lose the feature entirely.

The quiet ones

Secure delivery on every page with no mixed content. A language declared so speech knows how to pronounce the words. A viewport set so phones do not shrink the page.

A character encoding declared, so quotation marks and accented names do not turn into symbols.

None of these are visible when they work. All of them are obvious when they fail.

• Secure delivery on every page, with no mixed content
• A declared language, so speech pronounces the words correctly
• A viewport declaration, so phones do not shrink the page
• A character encoding, so quotation marks and accented names survive
• A favicon served with the right content type
• One main heading per page, and headings in order

How ours are checked

Every page written by Website Builder Studio passes a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards.

Because the structured data and the visible content come from the same source, the markup cannot describe steps or questions a visitor does not have.

This is the one of the four kinds where a genuinely useful check is possible end to end. Nothing here is legal advice, and standards are not law, but this is the cheapest quality you can own.

Because the structured data is generated from the same content the page displays, it cannot describe steps or questions a visitor does not have.