Validating a website is the process of ensuring that the pages on the site conform to the norms or standards defined by various organizations. Validation is essential and will ensure that your web pages are interpreted in the same way (the way you want it) by multiple machines, such as search engines and users and visitors to your web page.
After installing WordPress on your domain, you must ensure that your new website or existing one is free from errors. To do this, several quality-control measures will need to be taken. WordPress also provides a lot of details on quality control and validation methods. With the help of the following tools, you can virtually guarantee that your website will run smoothly.
Validation Checklist
To help you validate your WordPress site, here is a quick list:
- Validate HTML/XHTML
- Validate CSS
- Validate Links (check for dead links)
- Validate Feeds
- Check across different browsers (including handheld computers, Mac, PC, and cell phones, too)
- Re-validate HTML and CSS
- Have friends, relatives, and co-workers check your site
- When ready, you can post your site on the WordPress Forum for review
1. W3C validators
Much of your quality-control checking will be done on the W3C website. At this site, you can check the markup, links, and CSS of your WordPress website.
Link checking
This utility crawls your WordPress installation to test your links so that you can be sure that they all function correctly. If you find that linking errors exist, correct the error links and then rerun the utility until your website receives good results.
Markup Validator
After Link checking and correcting all your website errors, go to MarkUp Validator, Enter the URL for your home page into the Address text box and then click Check.
If you discover that your theme contains markup errors, you will need to fix these problems and rerun the validator until your website is error-free.
Other HTML – Validation Resources
- W3C’s Collection of Validators
- W3C Tidy Online
- Windows GUI Interface for TIDY
- Site Report Card Validator
- AnyBrowser’s HTML Validation
- HTMLvalidator.com’s Validator
- W3.org Tidy Validator
- Validated WordPress Plugin
2. CSS Validator
The last of the WC3 validators you will need to run is the CSS Validator; this utility will check your site and stylesheet for possible errors.
If problems were found, you would be shown these errors and warnings along with a section containing valid CSS information that you can use to correct these issues. After fixing these problems, rerun the utility until no errors are found.
Other CSS – Validation Resources:
3. Cross-browser compatibility (Adobe BrowserLab)
A website isn’t good if it doesn’t display correctly in all the major browsers. That’s why cross-browser compatibility is so important. A visit to Adobe BrowserLab will give you an exact rendering of your website as it appears on all the main browsers.
Feeds Validation
Wrap up
A site with errors faces a lot of trouble nowadays. It’s not all about Search Engines, but users also don’t like sites that are throwing errors. The competition is fierce on the World Wide Web of 2023, and to complete it; we must ensure that our WordPress sites run smoothly on all devices and browsers. If you think I missed anything important in this article, please let me know in the comments below.
Editorial Staff
Arslan Rashid
6 comments
Thanks for your post! Would love to hear your advice on how to fix the errors after validation, meaning, how to best correct each line of code? If using a visual builder plugin, is that possible?
Thank you in advance!
Very good post. Thanks for sharing.
Hello sir. my problem is my when i write article for my blog then posting area is fix. i am not able to write anything. visual option is not working and all option is hide. what i do. please help me
Hi Bulbul, contact us at https://wparena.com/contact-us/ and we will try to fix it.
Thanks
why show this error in media upload time the response is not a valid json response?
Good day
I stumbled upon your site looking for answers to fix my broken theme and am not sure if you offer such kind of support?
I have installed a second theme (landing page) on my domain in a sub folder. Everything worked as expected but then I decided to change the name of the folder and moved the files over and also made all the associated changes in the wp_config.php, index.php and .htaccess files as well as the database in phpMyAdmin and also including the below in the appropriate pages:
wp_config.php
define(‘WP_HOME’,’https://yourdomain.com/subfolder’);
define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’https://yourdomain.com/subfolder’);
functions.php
update_option(‘siteurl’,’https://yourdomain.com/subfolder’);
update_option(‘home’,’https://yourdomain.com/subfolder’);
The changes to Site URL showed up in the WordPress dashboard but when I viewed the page it routed to my main website. I then tweaked a few paths and then it displayed an error when attempting to view the site, but at least the URL path in the browser was correct.
At last I got the page to display, BUT the theme was broken. I then moved all the files back to the previous folder, made all the changes again, but the theme is still broken… Unfortunately I have not made a backup for this installation….
Your assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
JO