Technical and editorial errors on websites

The fact that a website works properly is the basis for successful business on the World Wide Web. However, if you want to ensure that your website is error-free, you must first understand which errors exist and which are critical.

There are many ways to categorize errors on the Internet and on websites. In this article we will distinguish between technical and editorial errors.

Technical errors

By technical errors we mean errors triggered by infrastructure or programming. Examples of these would be:

• Website or online store is not reachable
• Individual page types generate a 500 HTTP status code
• Images are no longer compressed
• All pages respond very slowly

All these - and many other - problems are caused by technical errors. These usually happen after a deployment or update of the CMS, blog or store system or individual plugins and components.

Of course, server and infrastructure problems can also occur, which then paralyze the website. This can happen if, for example, the server's hard disk fills up or the CPU was chosen too weakly so that it collapses under load.

All these errors have one thing in common, which makes monitoring web projects much easier. As soon as they occur, they occur on all pages. At least on all pages of the same type.

For example, if we have destroyed the compression of images during programming or configuration, or if we have included an error on the product page of an online store, these errors will occur on all pages or product pages. Programmatically they are all the same and thus these errors should also happen on all pages.

But why is this an advantage for surveillance? Quite simply. We always have to have only one page per page type in the monitoring and thus find all or most of the technical errors. So we can reduce the effort to a minimum.

Of course, technical errors also have a big disadvantage. Actually, it is the same as the advantage. They appear in the whole web project. So if one page is broken, they all are.

koality.io offers the appropriate monitors for these errors, because we store individual URLs for each page type, which are then continuously checked for errors.

Editorial errors

Editorial errors are different. They only occur on a few web pages and are therefore much harder to find. However, since they only occur on a few sites, they are also not nearly as critical as technical ones.

But what do we actually mean by editorial errors? Here are a few examples:

• Use of images or videos that are too large
• Dead links to pages that no longer exist
• Missing images that are embedded but no longer exist

Editorial errors are therefore to be found individually per article in the blog or CMS, or per product in an online store. Editorial errors are generated by the editors who accompany the project.

In order to find this type of error, it is not enough to set up simple monitoring for the different page types and examine them for problems every hour. Rather, a crawl must be done. Crawling means that all pages of a web offer are searched for errors and not only single ones.

koality.io offers a number of crawlers for this purpose, which search entire projects for exactly these errors and then report them. All these features and crawls are already included in the basic package.

The combination

If you want to keep a website clean and error-free, you should always aim for a combination of both monitoring methods. With the monitoring of the individual page types, one finds all or all important technical errors that can occur after a deployment.

Using the crawler to look over the majority of all pages in a project and find all editorial errors is then a wonderful addition.