Prepublish content check: How to ensure quality content on your site

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Prepublish Overview
• Prepublish Supported Plugins, Integrations, and Data Sources
• What are the key features of Prepublish?
• What checks are available in Prepublish checks?
• Platform decisions that are shown with Prepublish checks
• Prerequisites for using Prepublish check
• How do I use the Prepublish feature?
• FAQs on Prepublish
  • Can I check PDFs using Prepublish?
  • Can I install the CMS Plugin with only the Prepublish functionality? 
  • Can I use the API to carry out Prepublish Checks? 
  • Do I need a subscription to Prepublish?
  • Does Prepublish check for broken links?
  • Does the Prepublish take into account the Accessibility Site Target settings?
  • Why do the check results in Prepublish differ from those in the Siteimprove platform?
  • Where can I find more information on how to build a plugin with Prepublish checks?
  • Why am I seeing "No results yet, Page Not Found, or Missing Access to Page" messaging in the plugin? 
  • How do I tell if I am using the 'old' or 'new' plugin user experience (UI/UX)?
• Where can I learn more? 

Prepublish Overview

The Prepublish feature (also known as "Content Check") allows you to check the quality of your content before publishing it to your website with the Siteimprove CMS plugin, which enables Prepublish checks within your CMS software environment for specific providers. The Prepublish feature is also utilized with the Email Governance and Optimizely CMP integrations, allowing you to check the content of email or content marketing platforms before being published, and could be utilized with the Siteimprove API data source. 

The Prepublish functionality helps ensure high content quality that is optimized for accessibility requirements, search ranking, and company policies before being published.

Prepublish Supported Plugins, Integrations, and Data Sources

Prepublish is currently available in the following CMS Plugins, Integrations, and Data Sources. An increasing number of plugins and other integrations are gaining the Prepublish (Content Check) feature over time. Refer to this list and the documentation for specific plugins accessible via links on the Siteimprove CMS Plugin Page to determine whether a particular plugin supports Prepublish or not.   

Siteimprove Premium and Siteimprove-provided plugins

These plugins are developed and maintained by Siteimprove with help from our partners.

• Optimizely
  
• Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)
• Drupal
• Sitecore 
• Wordpress

Vendor-provided plugins

The following plugins are developed and maintained by CMS vendors in close collaboration with Siteimprove.

• Tridion (RWS)
• Cascade
• Magnolia

Community plugins

The following plugins are developed, maintained, and supported by third parties separate from Siteimprove.

• Sitefinity

Other Integrations that use the Prepublish (Content Check) feature

• Siteimprove Email Governance
• Optimizely CMP

Data source that utilizes the Prepublish (Content Check) feature

• Siteimprove API

What are the key features of Prepublish?

Automated accessibility checks 

Siteimprove Prepublish gives you instant insights into accessibility issues and actionable recommendations to ensure your content is in line with accessibility guidelines and regulations. 

On-page SEO diagnostics 

Siteimprove Prepublish pinpoints where you can fine-tune your content with best practice recommendations to pave the way for SEO success. 

Customizable company policies 

Easily adhere to branding, style, legal, and regulatory requirements with policies tailored to your organization. Our Prepublish functionalities highlight any violations of your brand guidelines across content utlizing policies you have configured to display in Prepublish

Instant quality checks 

Create a smooth experience for your visitors and strengthen your credibility with high content quality. Siteimprove Prepublish gives you an immediate overview of errors, making them visible and easy to fix, so your team can confidently publish error-free content. 

What checks are available in Prepublish checks?

The checks available depend on the Siteimprove features within your subscription, your CMS software, and the Integration that utilizes the Prepublish feature. Generally, the following checks are available:

Quality Assurance

• Misspellings
• Potential Misspellings
• Language Detection
• Readability
• Email Addresses
• Link Text
• Meta Tags
• Trademarks 

Accessibility 

We provide our full suite of page-level checks at the Prepublish stage. See: A Guide to the Siteimprove accessibility checks.

Policy

You can include any "Content" policies in your Prepublish checks, as long as the policies are marked in the Siteimprove Platform as: 

1. Enabled for all sites within the Siteimprove platform
2. Shared
3. Checked to display in the CMS plugin

SEO

SEO Technical Issues

• HTML validation errors
• Missing structured data markup
• Missing Open Graph tags
• Page-level nofollow tags
• Pages with noindex metatag
• Pages with frames or iFrames

SEO Content Issues

• Pages with low text-to-code ratio
• Empty meta descriptions
• Missing meta descriptions
• Pages with multiple meta descriptions
• Meta descriptions are too short
• Meta descriptions are too long
• Empty meta titles
• Pages with multiple meta titles
• Meta titles are too long
• Meta titles are too short
• Missing H1 tags
• Empty H1 tags
• Pages with multiple H1 headers
• Low content word count

SEO User Experience Issues

• Images missing alt attributes

Platform decisions that are shown with Prepublish checks

As the Prepublish (Content Check) utilizes a different checking process than the checks done in the Siteimprove Platform of the live published pages, at this time, only account-level decisions are reflected, and page-level and site-level decisions do not carry over. You also cannot make decisions on issues within the plugin or Prepublish checks, decisions need to be made within the Siteimprove Platform. 

Refer to the table below for a breakdown of the decisions available within the Siteimprove Platform, "Live view" ("This page") tab in CMS Plugins, and Prepublish (Content Checks).

Prerequisites for using Prepublish check

There are a number of Prerequisites required to use the Prepublish checks as listed in the following table.

Required	Required for	Details
Prepublish or Email Governance subscription under Siteimprove Account	All Integrations or data sources that utilize Prepublish.	The Email Governance integration requires an Email Governance subscription and all other integrations that use Prepublish require a Prepublish subscription. If you are not sure if you have the required subscription, contact Siteimprove.
User access to the Siteimprove platform	All Integrations or data sources that utilize Prepublish.	User access to the Siteimprove platform is required as you will need to log in to your Siteimprove account via the CMS plugin, Optimizely CMP, or Email Governance Integrations. You also need Siteimprove user access to create API keys to be used with the API or in CMS plugins to link to the API and Prepublish subscription.
API Key credentials	CMS Plugins and API	To enable Prepublish or to access the API, you’ll also need a Siteimprove API key. Follow the instructions in the article “How to connect to the Siteimprove API.” For the CMS plugins, we recommend that the user associated with the API key is not specific to a certain person and that the user has either Account Owner or Administrator level permissions in the Siteimprove platform. The “Content” endpoints in the API are strictly intended to be used for Prepublish checks (i.e. “Content Checks”).
CMS plugin with Prepublish functionality available	CMS Plugins	Make sure you have installed the latest version of Siteimprove’s CMS plugin supporting the Prepublish check feature.  See the Prepublish Supported Plugins and Integrations section of this page or refer to the documentation for specific plugins accessible via links on the Siteimprove CMS Plugin Page to determine whether a particular plugin supports Prepublish or not.  Follow the steps in the Help Center article “How to set up the plugin” and in the particular plugin's installation and usage guides accessible via links on the Siteimprove CMS Plugin Page under the specific plugin page's installation or user guide tab.
Enable Prepublish functionality in the CMS plugin	CMS Plugins	You will have to enable the Prepublish functionality when configuring the plugin. For details, please refer to the particular plugin's installation and usage guides accessible via links on the Siteimprove CMS Plugin Page under the specific plugin page's installation or user guide tab like highlighted in the screenshot below.
Install the Siteimprove Content Assistant Browser Extension on a Supported Browser	Optimizely CMP and Email Governance Integrations	Google Chrome: Install from the Chrome Web Store. Mozilla Firefox: Install from the Firefox Add-ons Store. Microsoft Edge: Install from the Edge Add-ons Store.
Optimizely CMP Access	Optimizely CMP Integration	You will need user access to Optimizely CMP to be able to set up the Optimizely CMP Integration.
User Access to one of the Email Platforms supported by the Email Governance Integration.	Email Governance Integration	Adobe Campaign Salesforce Pardot Marketo HubSpot Optimizely Campaign

How do I use the Prepublish feature?

Follow the steps above for Prerequisites and installation. Then, for usage of the Prepublish feature, refer to the following: 

• For CMS Plugins, first determine if you are using the "new" or "old" plugin experience by consulting the following section of this page: "How do I tell if I am using the 'old' or 'new' plugin user experience (UI/UX)?" Then follow the appropriate steps below for the plugin experience version.
  • New CMS plugin experience - refer to How to Run a Prepublish Check with the New Plugin UI.   
  • Old CMS plugin experience - refer to the particular plugin's usage guides accessible via links on the Siteimprove CMS Plugin Page under the specific plugin page's installation or user guide tab. 
• Email Governance - refer to the Siteimprove Email Governance Integration Installation and Usage Guide.
• Optimizely CMP - refer to the installation guide available under the Optimizely page. 
• Siteimprove API - follow the steps here for How to connect to the Siteimprove API. The “Content” endpoints in the API are strictly intended to be used for Prepublish (Content Checks). Siteimprove does not provide support or consultation services for custom API implementations though, so we don't have instructions on how to set up a custom Prepublish check implementation. 

FAQs on Prepublish

Can I check PDFs using Prepublish?

No, PDFs can only be checked after they are published and the site has been fully crawled/scanned.

Can I install the CMS Plugin with only the Prepublish functionality? 

No, to use Prepublish you must install and configure the full CMS Plugin that works with your CMS and checks against live published content on your site as well. Even if you remediate errors before publishing, errors can still come up down the road with changes made to the site, so it can be useful to have both options available. 

Can I use the API to carry out Prepublish Checks? 

Yes, the “Content” endpoints in the API are strictly intended to be used for Prepublish checks (i.e. “Content Checks”).

Do I need a subscription to Prepublish?

Yes, you need a subscription to Prepublish in order to use the feature. Contact Siteimprove if you have any questions regarding your subscription.

Does Prepublish check for broken links?

No. The Prepublish check shows the links but does not carry out a broken link check at this time due to the issues checking broken links causes with the check performance. Within AEM (Adobe Experience Manager), there are checks for broken links within AEM itself. Other CMS systems may have similar features available or broken links can be checked once the page is published via live page checks. 

Does the Prepublish take into account the Accessibility Site Target settings?

Unfortunately, it doesn't take into account the Site Target settings at this point. It shows all levels of issues. There currently aren't any filtering options, but this could change down the road.  

Why do the check results in Prepublish differ from those in the Siteimprove platform?

If you are comparing the Prepublish checks to the checks in the Siteimprove Platform, it is important to consider the Platform as the definitive source, as it possesses the complete functionality of the checks, decisions, and filtering options like their is available.

There can be many reasons why the Prepublish check results can differ from the Platform checks.

• The Prepublish checks utilize a separate process streamlined for Prepublish to perform checks of content, which is different from the process to perform checks in the Siteimprove platform.
• For the plugins, the Platform checks live published pages, which are crawled at an interval with a default of every 5 days, and changes may have been made to site templates or the page within the CMS, which is checked via Prepublish, since the page was last crawled. 
• The checks available in Prepublish may be different from the checks performed in the platform, as only certain checks are available or make sense to do in Prepublish and within certain integrations that utilize Prepublish. 
• Decisions are only taken into account at the Siteimprove Account-level, so you may not see site-level or page-level decisions reflected that you might see reflected in the Platform check results or the CMS plugin "Live view" or "This page" tabs. For more details on this review the section Platform decisions that are shown with Prepublish checks.
• The Accessibility Site Target settings are not reflected in the plugin, so you will see results for all of the levels of issues. Within the Siteimprove Platform, certain levels of checks might be filtered out from results due to the Site Target set. 

Where can I find more information on how to build a plugin with Prepublish checks?

You can reference Siteimprove CMS Plugin Integration Cookbook and the Siteimprove CMS Plugin SDK for information on how to build plugins. 

Why am I seeing "No results yet, Page Not Found, or Missing Access to Page" messaging in the plugin? 

This is actually expected behavior if the page is not published yet and the page has not yet been crawled in the Siteimprove platform under a site that you have access to. This is the perfect scenario to utilize the Prepublish check feature to check the content before it goes live. 

If this occurs for a page that is published and indexed in the Siteimprove platform, or is happening for all pages on the site, there may be another issue at play. Please refer to the article CMS Plugin: Why am I getting the error message "Missing access to page"? for additional reasons you might encounter error messages like this in the plugin and ways to resolve the issue. 

How do I tell if I am using the 'old' or 'new' plugin user experience (UI/UX)?

Old plugin Experience

With the "old plugin experience," there will be "This page, Site Overview, and My history" tabs, and the plugin overlay will look like the screenshot below. The Prepublish check is initiated from a button outside of the plugin overlay window typically, a blue loading bar will appear when the Prepublish check is processing, and you will need to select the "See results" button to see the Prepublish check results.

New plugin experience

For the "new plugin experience," there will be "Live page, Prepublish view, and Unpublish risks" tabs, and the plugin overlay will look something like the screenshot below. The "Prepublish view" tab, where the Prepublish checks are performed, should have the option, for most of the plugins, to select a button within the plugin overlay window to "Run a Content Check." When a Prepublish check is being performed, a progress bar will appear in the plugin overlay under the "Prepublish View" tab and when the check is complete the results for the check will update in the "Prepublish view" tab.

Where can I learn more? 

You can learn more on the Siteimprove Prepublish page.