Purpose
Acquia Optimize (formerly known as Monsido), is a web governance tool that helps agency managers improve their website’s accessibility, quality, readability, and speed. It also provides an overview of your website’s health, tracking broken links, readability scores, and accessibility issues—critical for creating a user-friendly, accessible experience.
Check out this two minute video to learn more about working with broken links
When to Use this Resources
- Review your site scans on at least a bi-weekly basis with Routine Website Audits. Reviewing your site on a weekly basis is the ideal to maintaining trust with your constituents. Studies on website quality have shown broken links reflect poor quality and impact trust.
- Validate the Creation of New Content: You can use the On Demand Scan to check a single page as you create new content or to check your site inbetween the regularly scheduled weekly or bi-weekly scans.
- Content Updates: You can use the Policy Scan as a tool when cleaning up old or outdated words, phrases or information, ensuring that pages are clear and compliant.
- Accessibility Checks: To meet readability and accessibility targets, such as a minimum score of 83% for accessibility and an 8th-grade reading level for readability.
Acquia Optimize On-Demand Site Scan
If you have just made changes to your website and want to run a scan with Acquia Optimize using the "Start on Demand Scan" which you can find by navigating to the gear icon in the upper right corner of the page and then selecting it which will take you to the Admin Settings section
From there you will select the "Action" button which will make a dropdown appear which is where you can then select the "Start on Demand scan".
You can also review this quick video on how to create an on-demand scan.
For the agency websites that are within our team, we currently have them set up to run a weekly scan and from that scan a report is sent out to the agencies emails that show the broken links and accessibility errors that were identified and need to be corrected.
Special Note: The best practices for how often to run a scan is once a week but if you are not receiving the reports for your site then please submit a service now ticket and our support team can help.
Checking the Status of Your Weekly Scan
You can see the scan progress of your site within the Domain Overview section.
If you notice that your scan has been paused for more than 48 hours, please contact the Acquia Optimize support team via email or chat to have it resumed.
Using the chat support feature generally results in a same-day response to help resume your scan.
Acquia Optimize Policy List Scan
If you want to do a search to locate all the pages that have a specific phrase, number, link or text in general then this is where the Policy List Scan will be the best fit for this task.
The policy feature is perfect for those who also want to do a scan of their whole site to make sure there are no "click here" or "read more" phrases on the site.
This is different from the on demand scan because you have more customization abilities on what text you specifically want it to scan your whole site for and show the exact pages for your team to fix.
Of course within the accessibility scan it will also show you any failing checks where non-descriptive link text may be used as well.
Why Some Links Are Incorrectly Marked as Broken
Within your Scan report there are several possible reasons for links to be flagged as broken or with errors when they are actually not:
The target server was down at the time of the scan.
A re-scan normally fixes the problem. Within the Action button you can select Mark as Ignored the link to stop checking this link permanently.
The target server might be set to block site scanners and spiders such as ours.
Sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and others block scanners that make many requests to their site. We scan thousands of websites every day and make many requests to these websites and they do often block our scanner. This can cause the scan to hang or stop. In most cases, you can safely ignore the link if you know that it is correct.
The target server has an invalid HTTPS certificate.
An invalid certificate causes the link to be marked as dead. Get in touch with the manager of the website and ask them to fix their certificate, or ignore the link if this is impossible.
The link points to a login page.
The link points to a page that requires a login. Such pages are often tagged as 'dead'. Within the Action button you can select Mark as Ignored the link to stop checking this link permanently.
How to Locate the Acquia Optimize Policy Scan
Within Acquia Optimize, under the Policy tab, you can click on the “Add New Policy” button within your policy list if you need to have a certain word or link searched through all of the pages on your site.
How to Create a Policy Scan of your Site
Within the Policies Page you will first select "Add new Policy" in the far right
Within the new window that opens you now select "Create your own Policy"
Then select "All Assets" box
Within the next window make sure to scroll down and have your Domain selected within the dropdown in the settings tab, just click "Choose your Domain"
From there you can click the "Add Rule to Policy" within the right side field and when you do a list will appear and from there you will pick the "Select text from the list "
This is now where you can add the word/phrase that you want the scan to search for.
Make sure to click save after you've added the policy rule and once you finish saving the policy one final time the window will bring you back to the policy list page and the scan will run automatically!
How to locate broken links
You can easily identify broken links on your site through the weekly reports sent to agencies by Acquia Optimize (formerly known as Monsido).
Within this report you will that the Quality Assurance section will show the number of broken links and potential misspellings on your site:
Acquia Optimize can also show you each page that the broken link appears on, you will first need to make sure you are logged into Acquia Optimize and then select the "Quality Assurance" button:
From there you will then select the "Unique broken links" section to pull up the list of the broken links.
Within this list you will be able to see each page that has the broken link by selecting the page number which will cause a pop up window to appear that has a list of all of the pages with that broken link:
Next to have Acquia Optimize to show you where the broken link is at within your page you can select the magnifying glass icon within the right corner of the pop up window.
If you have Acquia Optimize web browser extension added it will appear on the right side of the screen after you click on the magnifying glass.
Now if the web browser doesn't automatically highlight the broken link on the page after you've clicked on the magnifying glass you can still easily locate it by clicking on the magnifying glass within the web browser pop up window and it should then highlight where the broken link is on the page.
How to fix a broken link
Once you have the broken link located on the page you can now fix the broken link by selecting the edit button that is above the title of your page.
Within the page edit section you can now click the broken link and then to fix it you can select the the pencil icon which will appear when you click the link text:
After you now have the link fixed make sure to save the page and then within the Acquia Optimize chrome extension browser window you can mark the broken link as fixed by selecting the check mark:
Or you can also mark the broken link as fixed within the Acquia Optimize page by selecting the "Open page details" button next to the magnifying glass
From the new window that pops up you will select the action button and then you can select the "set to fixed" to also mark the broken link as fixed so that it removes it from your report and thus improving your Quality Assurance score!