Best Practices Reports identify opportunities to improve usability, content quality and the overall user experience of your website.
Unlike Accessibility Reports, Best Practices checks are not strict WCAG requirements. Instead, they highlight common content and technical patterns that may make websites more difficult to understand, navigate or maintain.
These reports can help website managers identify improvements that contribute to a better experience for all users.
Understanding Best Practices Reports
Best Practices checks are recommendations based on common web development, content strategy and usability standards.
A page may function correctly and still appear in a Best Practices report.
For this reason, Best Practices reports are often best viewed as opportunities to improve content quality rather than errors that must always be fixed.
How Best Practices Reports Differ from Accessibility Reports
Accessibility Reports are based on established accessibility requirements such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Best Practices Reports identify recommended improvements that may enhance usability and content quality but are not necessarily accessibility violations.
One important distinction is that Best Practices issues do not affect your overall DubBot site score.
Even so, they are worth reviewing because they often highlight opportunities to create clearer, more usable content.
Common Best Practices Issues
Examples of checks you may encounter include:
- Missing level-one headings (H1)
- Heading structure recommendations
- Page organization issues
- Content structure improvements
- Technical recommendations that improve usability
DubBot provides explanations and guidance for each issue, helping website managers understand why a recommendation was generated.
Learn more about headings in Drupal.
DubBot Documentation
Video Tutorial
Review the DubBot Best Practices Reports video tutorial.
This transcript has been lightly edited for readability and accuracy. It contains the spoken content from the Best Practices Reports video and is provided as an alternative format for users who prefer reading the material instead of watching the recording.
DubBot Best Practices Reports Video Transcript
Welcome back to the DubBot Training Series. In this video, we'll explore Best Practices Reports.
Best Practices Reports identify items that may improve usability, content quality and overall user experience.
Unlike Accessibility Reports, these checks are not strict WCAG requirements. However, they are still valuable recommendations that can help improve the quality of your website.
Best Practices checks are recommendations based on common web development and content standards. These reports identify opportunities to improve user experience, even when a page is technically functioning correctly.
One important difference between Best Practices and some of the other categories is that Best Practices issues do not impact your overall DubBot site score. Even so, they're worth reviewing because they often identify opportunities to make content easier to understand and navigate.
Let's look at one example.
DubBot has identified an issue called Page should contain a level-one heading. Headings provide structure and help users understand the organization of content on a page.
In this case, the page contains an H2 heading and additional headings, but it does not contain a level-one heading, also known as an H1.
This particular example comes from one of our content block demonstration pages. These pages exist primarily to show how individual components look and behave. Because of that, the warning is expected in this example.
On a typical content page, however, you would generally want to ensure that the page includes a meaningful H1 heading so users and assistive technologies can understand the primary topic of the page.
If you need to investigate or correct an issue, you can select View in Drupal to open the content directly in the Drupal editing interface. From there, you can review the page structure and make any necessary adjustments.
After making changes, Refresh Content retrieves an updated copy of the page from the live website so DubBot can evaluate the latest version.
Analyze reruns DubBot's tests against the content it already has stored. Depending on the situation, either option may be useful, but Refresh Content is typically the best choice after updating a page in Drupal.
That concludes our overview of Best Practices Reports in DubBot.
Remember the key takeaways from this session. Best Practices checks are recommendations that can improve usability and content quality. They do not affect your overall site score, but they are still valuable opportunities for improvement.
Review issues in context and use View in Drupal, Refresh Content and Analyze when needed.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video where we'll explore Spell Check Reports.