Why we moved from Siteimprove to Sitemorse

Friday 10 March 2017

Last year I wrote a blog post about how we were using Siteimprove to help find and fix broken links and spelling mistakes on our website. But a few months ago we decided to move to another company to provide this service, a company called Sitemorse.

How they work

Siteimprove and Sitemorse both provide a range of online tools that help to manage and maintain your website by looking at; accessibility, branding, code quality, links, SEO, performance, and spelling. These services regularly scan your webpages searching for errors in these areas. They then produce a report detailing any errors that have been found.

While both of these companies offer a similar service we decided that Sitemorse had a slight edge on the tools that they were able to provide us with.

What Sitemorse does better

While evaluating Sitemorse we ran a side-by-side comparison with Siteimprove. One of the main tests was to see how accurate each service was when searching for broken links. We found that Sitemorse was more consistent when finding broken links, whereas Siteimprove had a greater tendency to report false positives and miss genuinely broken links.

We also found that Sitemorse provided more in-depth analysis of the results. The reports produced go into a huge amount of detail, providing more information about why we are getting low scores in certain areas. This allows us to have a better understanding of where and why problems are occurring. It is particularly useful for web developers. For example, Sitemorse will report issues with incorrect HTML tags or missing images referred to in the CSS.

One of the nice features provided by Sitemorse is a tool called ‘Snapshot’. This allows you to create unlimited on-demand reports for any webpage, this isn’t limited to pages on your domain. This allows you to do one-off scans of pages that aren’t included within the standard page scan limit.

What Siteimprove does better

One of the areas that Siteimprove does really well is the user interface. Information is represented more visually compared to Sitemorse, which makes it easier to monitor progress and quickly identify problem areas. In contrast, Sitemorse provides reports that are more text intensive, which take a little more time to fully understand and use.

All of the tools provided by Siteimprove are really intuitive and easy to use, allowing anyone to quickly understand how to use all of the features. This contrasts with Sitemorse, which has more complex tools that take longer to learn.

One feature that Siteimprove has that is missing from Sitemorse is the ability to rescan a page. Once you’ve made the necessary changes to a page you can quickly rescan the page and make sure all of the issues have been resolved. This feature isn’t available on Sitemorse – you will need to wait for the next scheduled scan for the report to be updated.

Why we choose Sitemorse

There is an overlap in the services that both companies provide, but we felt that while it does take a little more time to get familiar with how Sitemorse works, it is worth the extra initial effort for the greater level of confidence and more in-depth analysis that it provides.

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