Put the Design in Front of a Browser and See Whether a Whole Page Comes Back
Every check we ran on a design read its files. None of them answered the question that decides whether the design works at all: put it in front of a browser, with a real account behind it, and does a complete page come back?
Why the obvious test is not enough
The obvious test is the status code. Fetch the page, look for 200, move on. That misses the most common way a page breaks.
When something fails partway through rendering, the beginning of the page has already been sent to the browser. The status code went out with it, and it said 200. So the response is a success, several hundred kilobytes arrive, and the page simply stops in the middle. No error, no warning, nothing in a log that anybody reads. A visitor sees a site that trails off into white space.
The reliable signal is whether the document closes properly. If the final closing tag never arrives, something died on the way. That is now checked on every design, along with the status code, the response size, and whether any error text leaked into the visible page.
What it found immediately
Two designs were returning a hard error and had been for some time. Both broke on a stricter version of PHP that turns what used to be a warning into a fatal, so they stopped working at a platform upgrade rather than because anybody touched them. One had a misplaced bracket in a line counting your professional titles. The other crashed on any account with no representation listed, which is a large share of actors and exactly the ones least likely to report it.
Two more were serving the incomplete pages described above: 200 OK, substantial, and cut off.
All four are fixed. More to the point, the next four will be found the day they appear rather than whenever somebody happens to look.
What this means for you
Nothing to do, and that is the intent. A design failing on accounts with a particular shape of data is not something an individual actor can be expected to notice, especially when the failure only happens for other people's accounts and not their own.
If you have ever loaded your own site and thought it looked oddly short, it is worth another look now.
Related
This check is what found the placeholder content in demo copy is gone from every design, because reading the rendered page rather than the source is what makes those visible at all.
It sits alongside link monitoring across your site and the page speed work. Browse the designs in the catalog, or create a free actor website.
