What is a Quick scan?
A Quick scan covers the majority of Silktide checks (around 80%) and is optimized for checking content before making content live. It is ideal for pre-publication checks.
It covers spelling, grammar, broken links, readability, most of Accessibility, most of Marketing, most of User Experience, all of Privacy, and all Policies.
Testing pages before publishing
A key advantage of quick scans is they can be used to check content before it is published:
Make unpublished changes in your CMS
View a preview of the resulting page
Quick scan the preview
Silktide detects many common CMS’ and will make adjustments to the preview to test it accurately. For example, in WordPress, a toolbar is shown above pages when they are being previewed – Silktide will remove that from consideration when testing.
Testing private pages
Another key advantage of quick scans is they can be run on any page, even if it isn’t on the public internet.
This is possible because our extension extracts the information it needs from your browser.
So as long as you can see a page in your browser, the extension can test it.
In contrast, Full scans can only test pages on the public internet.
What is omitted
Quick scans omit some checks:
Mobile checks (e.g. is the page designed for mobile, does it scroll in two dimensions, are links too small)
Focus checks (e.g. is focus visible when navigating via keyboard)
Technology checks (what technologies does this page use)
Some accessibility checks (generally lower weight, or not affecting scores)
These checks have been omitted for one of two reasons: they would either drastically increase testing time, or they aren’t currently technically feasible via the Browser Extension. We expect to gradually increase coverage by tackling both challenges.
The effect of these checks on scoring is usually modest. In most cases, Full and Quick scan results will be almost identical, unless the page has a poor mobile experience. Using the Browser Extension, you can compare the scores side-by-side, by testing a page with both, and swapping between the “Quick scan” and “Full scan” tabs.