None of the seven checks in this module are individually dramatic, but together they're often what separates a site that feels careless from one that feels trustworthy — and several of them directly affect how many visitors you actually keep.
| Element | Plain English |
|---|---|
| Mobile viewport | Whether the page is configured to properly resize and scale on phones, rather than showing a tiny, zoomed-out desktop layout. |
| Broken links | Links on your page that point to pages which no longer exist, returning an error instead of content. |
| Custom 404 page | A helpful, branded "page not found" page instead of a bare server error when someone hits a broken or mistyped URL. |
| Image alt text | Short text descriptions attached to images, read aloud by screen readers and shown when an image fails to load. |
| DOCTYPE declaration | Whether the page starts with <!DOCTYPE html> — missing this makes browsers render the page in a legacy compatibility mode with inconsistent behavior. |
| Charset declaration | Whether the page declares its text encoding (almost always UTF-8) — missing this can cause special characters to display as garbled text. |
| Deprecated HTML tags | Old tags like <center>, <font>, or <marquee> that browsers still support but were removed from the HTML standard years ago. |
Over half of web traffic globally comes from mobile devices, so a broken mobile viewport alone can undermine everything else on the page. Broken links and a missing 404 page both leave visitors stranded with no path back into your site — measurably increasing how many people simply leave. DOCTYPE and charset issues are rarer today but still show up on older or hand-rolled sites, and both can cause subtle rendering bugs that are hard to trace back to the actual cause.
Most CMS platforms handle the viewport tag, DOCTYPE, and charset automatically in the theme template. Broken links are worth checking periodically as your site grows, since links that were valid at launch can silently break as external sites restructure. Alt text is a simple habit to build into your content workflow — write one whenever you add an image, rather than retrofitting hundreds of images later. Deprecated tags are usually leftovers from an old template; swap them for modern CSS equivalents (e.g. <center> → text-align: center).
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