Where does Sitemorse help?

Web Site Assessment

Sitemorse can assess a site starting at a URL. Sitemorse assesses the page in detail across many areas including accessibility, brand, code quality, email, function/links, SEO and metadata, trademarks, performance, privacy, and spelling. For each link on the page, Sitemorse then performs the same set of comprehensive tests on those pages (or documents if the link points to a document). The process continues with links on all those pages and so on until either the site has no more links or the required number of pages has been reached. For example, a 100-page audit will look at the first 100 pages found then stop.

Sitemorse displays the results of all this information through the Sitemorse Dashboard.

Journey Monitoring

Sitemorse Journey Monitoring ensures that users of your site can navigate between pages on your site in a single browsing session, entering details where appropriate and arriving at the last page of the journey successfully. An example might be to check the process of viewing a page, completing a form and a subsequent thank you page is working correctly.

Sitemorse uses an agreed detailed plan of the journey including: URLs to be accessed; any information that needs to be supplied to forms such as valid user details; and any text that must appear on the resulting page.

If the journey fails, the client is notified. Sitemorse displays the journey monitoring results in the Sitemorse Dashboard.

Web Application Testing

As web browsers have become more sophisticated and client machines have become more powerful, it is now possible to run large JavaScript applications in the web browser. In most sites, the JavaScript makes very few modifications to the HTML. For example, JavaScript might be used to validate the data entered on a form (for example, registration passwords match) or it might add a specific component to part of the page. As example of the latter, the JavaScript might place an interactive map on part of a page, such as, Google Maps. In some extreme cases, a JavaScript application builds the entire content of the page and accessing the page with JavaScript turned off results in an almost blank page.

Sitemorse does not automatically evaluate JavaScript. One way to check how much of a page is modified by a JavaScript application is to run the browser with JavaScript disabled and then see if enough of the page still exists to use the site. If, for example, the page is blank, it will be difficult to evaluate with Sitemorse.

Does Sitemorse do the same as Google Lighthouse Testing?

The short answer is yes and no. Google Lighthouse covers specific areas of site testing, web application testing and mobile application testing. Although Sitemorse carries out many tests checks and measures for web pages that are the same as some tests for lighthouse, Sitemorse does not perform specific web application testing or mobile application testing. For example, Sitemorse would check for the correct use of attributes and broken links but would not check for pages still working when you are offline or verifying the user is informed they are offline.