Spelling
Summary
Misspellings can cause a website to look unprofessional and leave a negative impression for your visitors. It’s important to make sure that there are no misspellings on your site, but also to check to see if there are any grammatical issues with your content that wouldn’t necessarily get flagged as a misspelling.
Read more on Siteimprove.com:
Find Misspellings
Siteimprove will crawl your site looking for any misspellings. It will flag words that it doesn’t have added to its database, so if you have words on your site that are very specific to the Wake Forest culture, for example, those words may get flagged as being misspelt.
There are three categories that misspellings fall into:
- Confirmed misspellings: These are listed under the “Misspellings” tab. To see a misspelling in context, click on the number in the “Pages” column to see which pages it occurs on.
- Words to approve: Review words to confirm whether they are misspellings or words that are actually correct in the context of a specific site(s). The more words you review and categorize, the more accurate the spellcheck will be in the future.
- Approved words: Approved words won’t be marked as misspellings in the future. This is useful if you want to avoid having proper names, addresses, and brand or trademark names flagged in future spellchecks.
How to fix a misspelling using this report
If Siteimprove finds any confirmed misspellings or words to approve on your site, they will appear in the table on this page.
Correcting a misspelling
- Click the arrow under Pages in the table (far right). This will show you what page(s) the misspelling occurs on.
- Click the URL of the page. It will open a new tab and you’ll be shown where the misspelling is.
- For this step, you will need to make sure you’re logged into your website. To correct it, click the Edit in CMS link at the top of the page.
- Edit the word in WordPress.
- Once you’ve corrected the spelling, update your page.
Approving a word that’s correct
- You can scan all the words that are flagged and click the checkbox next to each word that is correct.
- Click the Approve word blue button to approve the word(s). Once you do this those words will be added to the Approved words category.
- If you prefer to approve words one at a time, click the box next to the word and then click the thumbs up button under Decision for site column. There is no need to click the thumbs down button.
- Once the word is approved, a confirmation message will show up letting you know that your decision has been applied.
Pages with misspellings or words to review
This is where you will find a list of all pages with misspellings or words that need to be reviewed. This is a helpful report if you prefer to view the pages that (potential) misspellings occur on vs. seeing a report of all the misspellings.
How to fix a misspelling using this report
Correcting a misspelling
- Click the arrow under Misspellings in the table. This will show you what word(s) are misspelt on that page.
- Click the URL of the page above. It will open a new tab and you’ll be shown where the misspelling is.
- For this step, you will need to make sure you’re logged into your website. To correct it, click the Edit in CMS link at the top of the page.
- Edit the word in WordPress.
- Once you’ve corrected the spelling, update your page.
Approving a word that’s correct
- Click the arrow under Words to approve in the table. This will show you what word(s) are misspelt on that page.
- You can check the box next to the word and click the blue Approve word button right above or you can click the thumbs up button under Decision for page.
- Once the word is approved, a confirmation message will show up letting you know that your decision has been applied.
Decisions on Spellings
All decisions that have been made on approved words and misspellings will appear here. Here you can undo existing decisions, which will place a word back into its original state.
Word Inventory
The word inventory gives you an alphabetical overview of every word that has been detected on your website. If you find a word that is misspelt, you can flag it (clicking the thumbs down button). It will then add it back to your misspellings report where you can correct it along with other words that need to be corrected.
In addition to using this report to find misspellings, it may be helpful if you’re looking to remove or replace certain words on your site. You can search for that word and view what pages it appears on.
Add Words
This is where you can control which words should and should not be flagged in the spellcheck by adding approved words and confirmed misspellings.
Quality Assurance Topics to Explore
Siteimprove QA Resources
- Guides & FAQs: Quality Assurance
- Creating inclusive content
- Quality Assurance: Broken Links and Misspellings