What is Silktide?

Silktide is a platform for understanding and improving large websites. Silktide monitors your websites continuously, and automatically lets your team know when there are problems or opportunities to improve.

Silktide helps by testing your web pages for things like spelling and grammar mistakes, accessibility compliance, data privacy, search engine optimization, and overall user experience.

This Getting Started guide aims to get you up and running with Silktide and will help you to:

• Understand your website reports
• Understand the testing modules that Silktide offers (Content, Accessibility, SEO, Privacy and User Experience)
• Use Dashboards to quickly see the big picture
• Use Tasks to organize your work and collaborate with other team members
• Find a workflow that works for you

Welcome to Silktide! ?

Key benefits of using Silktide

Silktide consolidates many of your website management and review processes into a single system, allowing you to:

1. Identify and fix problems quickly
2. Keep your team aware of how well their websites are performing
3. Benchmark parts of your websites against each other, or against competitors, using dashboards.
4. Break up complex areas like accessibility and SEO into manageable actions
5. Understand what your website contains and manage it better
6. Deliver a consistently better web experience

The challenges of large websites

Traditionally, large websites are managed in one of two ways, both of which have major problems.

Some websites are centralized, with contributors to the website passing their requests through a central web team:

This usually breaks down at scale, as too much demand is placed upon a single team.

The typical solution to this is a decentralized team, with contributors using a CMS to make changes to the website themselves:

The problem here is that websites almost always exhibit frequent issues with quality and consistency.

Silktide acts as a guardian of your website, detecting issues, enforcing your guidelines, and automatically providing feedback to your website contributors:

Silktide allows your organization to make rapid changes to your websites with confidence, knowing that quality is maintained and can be reviewed by anyone.

What Silktide does

The Silktide platform is designed to cover all of the major concerns of a modern website – from copywriting, to marketing, accessibility, GDPR compliance and more. You also can design your own guidelines (Policies) to meet your own custom requirements.

The primary areas of a website covered by Silktide are:

Content

• Spelling and grammar checking
• Broken links
• Readability
• Content accessibility
• Content SEO

Accessibility

• Validate website compliance against WCAG 2.1 A, AA and AAA standards
• Guidelines
• Mobile accessibility testing

Marketing

• Search keyword rankings for you and your competitors
• PPC advertising
• Content optimization
• Technical optimization
• Backlinks
• Popularity
• Amount of Content

User experience

• Mobile user experience
• Images
• Uptime
• Functionality (including broken pages, missing images, JavaScript errors)

Privacy (GDPR)

• Audit of your forms, cookies, technologies and more
• Smart GDPR recommendations

Policies

• Define custom rules to meet your own requirements
• Choose from a policy library of standard rules to get started

Inventory

• Lists your tested and untested pages and documents
• Lists any contact details found on your website
• Lists your links, content languages, favicons and more
• Lists the technologies used by your website