Purpose
Acquia Optimize, previously called Monsido, is a web governance tool. It helps agency managers boost their website’s accessibility, quality, readability, and speed. It also gives you a look at your website’s health. It tracks broken links, readability scores, and accessibility issues. This info is key for making your site user-friendly and accessible.
Check out this two minute video to learn more about working with broken links
When to use this resource
- 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 in between 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- Content Updates: You can use the Policy Scan as a tool when cleaning up old or outdated words, phrases or information, ensuring that pages are clear and compliant.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. Our goal is a minimum score of 83% for accessibility and an 8th-grade reading level for readability.
Acquia Optimize on-demand site scan
To run a scan with Acquia Optimize after updating your website, click the gear icon in the upper right corner. Then select "Start on Demand Scan." This will take you to the Admin Settings section.
From there you will select the "Action" button. A dropdown will appear. You can then select the "Start on Demand scan".
You can also review this quick video on how to create an on-demand scan.
Our team runs a weekly scan on the agency websites. Each scan generates a report. This report is sent to the agencies via email. It highlights broken links and accessibility errors that need fixing.
Special Note: The best practice for how often to run a scan is once a week. If you are not receiving the reports for your site, please submit a ServiceNow 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
To find all pages with a specific phrase, number, link, or text, use the Policy List Scan. It’s the best option for this task.
This policy feature is great for anyone who wants to scan their entire site. It helps ensure there are no "click here" or "read more" phrases present.
This differs from the on-demand scan. Here, you can customize what text to scan for. It shows exact pages for your team to fix.
The accessibility scan will also show any failing checks. This includes cases where non-descriptive link text is used.
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 to stop checking this link permanently.
The target server might be set to block site scanners and spiders.
Sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and others block scanners that make many requests to their site. Thousands of websites are scanned every day and make many scan requests. They may 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 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" on the far right.
Within the new window that opens you now select "Create your own policy."
Then select the "All Assets" box.
In the next window, scroll down and select the "Choose your domain" dropdown box in the settings tab, and select your domain.
From there you can click the "Add Rule to Policy" within the right side field. A list will appear and from there you will pick the "Select text from the list."
This is 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. 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 view broken links on your site in the weekly reports from Acquia Optimize (formerly Monsido).
This report shows the Quality Assurance section. It will list broken links and possible misspellings on your site:
To find each page with a broken link, log into Acquia Optimize. Click the "Quality Assurance" button.
From there, select the "Unique broken links" section to see the list of the broken links.
Click on a page number to see a list of pages with broken links. A pop-up window will show you all the affected pages.
To find the broken link on your page, click the magnifying glass icon in the top right corner of the pop-up window in Acquia Optimize.
If you have the Acquia Optimize browser extension, it shows up on the right side of the screen when you click the magnifying glass.
If the web browser doesn't highlight the broken link after you click the magnifying glass, you can still find it. Just click the magnifying glass in the pop-up window, and it will show you the broken link on the page.
How to fix a broken link
To fix the broken link, first find it on the page. Then, click the edit button above your page title.
In the page edit section, click the broken link. To fix it, select the pencil icon that appears when you click the link text.
Now that the link is fixed, save the page. Then, in the Acquia Optimize Chrome extension, mark the broken link as fixed by clicking the check mark.
You can mark the broken link as fixed in Acquia Optimize. Just click the "Open page details" button next to the magnifying glass.
In the new window, click the action button. Then, choose "set to fixed" to mark the broken link as fixed. This will remove it from your report and improve your Quality Assurance Score.