Troubleshooting Your Website

It is important to test your website on various browsers to ensure that the content displays correctly. You should verify that the site is working as expected using the SEO page generator. Note that the SEO page generator is a headless browser, used to expose product URLs on your website to search bots. For site compatibility testing, you should consider the SEO page generator the same as any other web browser, such as Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and others. You can use the logging mechanisms included in the SEO page generator to help troubleshoot problems you may find while testing.

Note:

The following procedures are for testing your site on a public domain. You cannot view the website on a local host environment when JavaScript is disabled.

Testing Your Website

1. Disable JavaScript in the browser. Refer to instructions for the browser you are working with. The following instructions are for Chrome:

   1. Click the Chrome Menu on the browser toolbar.

   2. Click Settings.

   3. Click Show advanced settings.

   4. Under Privacy, click Content Settings.

   5. Under JavaScript, choose Do not allow any site to run JavaScript.

   6. Click Done.

2. Go to your site home page, for example, http://www.mywebstore.com.

3. Refresh the home page. You should see an error indicating that JavaScript is disabled. This is expected.

You should be able to go to all the pages of your site, and view text and images. To test your website, click through the links on your website to verify that all the content is rendered as you expect.

Using the SEO Page Generator for Troubleshooting

1. Ensure that JavaScript has been disabled in your browser. Follow instructions in Testing Your Website.

2. View the debug log provided by the SEO page generator. Follow instructions in SEO Page Generator Debug Log.

Finding Errors

To find errors, search the page displaying the source code. Press Ctrl+F, and then type error into the search box that displays in the browser.

Note:

The same error may be reported differently by the SEO page generator and desktop browser. Consequently, you may find that some errors that are logged in the SEO page generator are not apparent in the desktop browser.

Guidelines for Finding Errors

• Best Practice: Web developers can use console.log in Reference Implementation customizations to verify that code is running properly. Typically, console.log is used to log a message to the JavaScript console in the browser, but the output is also included in the SEO debug log displayed in view-source mode. By using console.log, web developers can see the code that is running, and track customizations.

• JavaScript files that are improperly referenced return Internal Error 500 in the debug log. When you reference a JavaScript file, you should include the URL root in the path. Note that spaces in file names cause errors. Use the following format to create a link or cross reference: domain/url_root/file_path. Note the following examples:

  Correct

  http://www.mywebstore.com/ShopFlow/js/custom/tracking-footer.js

  Incorrect

  http://www.mywebstore.com/ShopFlow/js/custom/tracking footer.js

Related Topics

• SEO Page Generator
• SEO and Redirects
• SEO and Robots.txt
• Sitemap Generator
• Adding a Third-Party Script for Analytics Tracking

General Notices