Saturday 28 August 2021

Problems with Shell UK website show up 'enhancement opportunity' for Scrutiny

 I'm used to seeing a lot of 'image without alt text' warnings. It now seems almost normal, despite the fact that it's a HTML validation error as well as an SEO black mark. It's a quick win, why are we so lax?

In this case there are many other html warnings; missing closing divs, p within h3, closing p with open span. (There are a lot of warnings, just a small section is shown in the screenshot below.)

Multi-headed monster

The SEO results showed up 'missing title' on many important pages. This was hard to believe and indeed it shouldn't be believed - the title tags are present. However (I might call this a bug in Scrutiny) some pages seem to have multiple <head> sections, some even nested! 

This unexpected issue tricks Scrutiny into 'body' mode rather than 'head' mode, and it's likely to miss other meta data and <link> tags. I will see that Scrutiny gets an update so that it handles this situation properly - correctly reports the multiple <head> tags and doesn't miss the titles.

Another important issue is links to insecure http:// pages from secure https:// pages - including an http version of the contact form.

The bad links report is juicy. Some are deceptive; it's not unusual for a redirect to a login page to give a 4xx status, we could find out the reason for that and adjust settings. But there are many links here that really are 404. Again, this is a quick win. 

This all adds up to very poor quality. It surprises me that one of the top brands is putting so little into its website upkeep. (site: https://www.shellenergy.co.uk crawled using Scrutiny 28 Aug 2021).

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