When developing a Sitecore solution using any version between 6.5- to 7.2, it is very important to ensure that the Site Health reports are considered during the development process. These reports can give non-technical users insight to potential pitfalls with the user experience, with the messaging of the content, or clues as to the stability of the entire user experience.
This article will illustrate some key examples of how to make sure that the out of box Site Health reports provide valuable insight to site administrators and content experience managers.
Site Health Reports
In Sitecore 6.5 – 7.2, the Site Health Reports are located within Engagement Analytics module. To navigate to Site Health Reports, open up Engagement Analytics from the “Sitecore” menu, then expand “Site Health”.
Each report provides valuable insight to the overall health of a Sitecore website. However, this depends on what type of functionality a website contains and what potential errors a user might encounter due to the result of a customized user experience. To ensure that those pitfalls are captured and made available to the Health reports, a developer needs to make sure that certain failures are tracked in such a way that Sitecore can report on each occurrence of an error.
Default Health Reports List
Common Mistakes
This report will let you know what errors are cumulatively occurring more often than other errors within the Sitecore solution.
Latest Failures
This is a quick and easy view to see which errors have occurred recently.
Not Found Urls
This report list all of the occurrences where the Sitecore “NotFound.aspx” page has been triggered. This report simply lets you know when 404 web response errors occur.
Pages That Report Errors
This report will list pages that are generating errors sorted by the page that is generating the most errors. This report can truly help narrow what pages are problematic and can help reduce the amount of troubleshooting time it takes to resolve the issue.
Slow Pages
Identifies which pages are taking the longest to display to your site visitors
One important perspective to understand, is that these reports will only be as valuable as you make them. A collaboration session with the individuals who responsible for monitoring your website or who determines the health of your site based on the site’s user experience is a key prerequisite in making the Engagement Analytics Site Health reports effective.
Page Events
Sitecore uses a process called “Page Events” in order to track page errors that are recorded in the Site Health Reports. Any page event can be marked as a failure which tells Sitecore to display event in the Site Health reports. Below are a list of out of the box page events that will display in the reports.
-
Campaign Registration Failed
-
No Search Hits Found
-
Page Error - An error occurred on the page
-
Page Not Found -Page was not found
If you have the web forms for marketers module installed, below are a list of page errors that may show up in the Site Health Reports
-
Field Not Completed - This should be triggered when validation on a required field fails, due to that field not having been filled in by the visitor.
-
Field Out of Boundary -This should be triggered when validation in a field fails due to the value entered falling outside the allowed boundaries of the field.
-
Form Check Action Error -This should be triggered when a Check Action fails.
-
Form Save Action Failure - This should be triggered by the failure of a Save Action
-
Form Threshold Exceeded - This should be triggered when the form submits threshold is exceeded.
-
Invalid Field Syntax -This should be triggered when validation on a field fails due to failing a particular syntax check.
Programmatically Registering a Page Error
To start tracking page errors and allowing these reports to record these errors, below is a code example that can be used to register a page error. The code break down is very simple and any developer should be able to implement this into a Sitecore project.
It is not recommended to drop stack traces or text directly from an exception, but to use nomenclature that a non-technical user would understand.
Programmatically Register No Hits Found From Local Site Search
This report is very valuable to a marketer who wants to ensure that the search terms site visitors are using on their website brings up relevant content. This report is designed to inform you of keywords that do not return any results. This can give insight as to what keywords your content may contain so that your local site search can be optimized based on practical user engagement.
The “Latest Failures” report presents the result of this error in a very nice and concise view.
In conclusion, it is worth a 30 minute review of your website to determine what potential errors needs to be tracked. This will empower the marketing team to be more equipped to address the areas of the site both good and bad that might affect the site visitor’s experience. Awareness is usually the first step to identifying roadblocks and making a change for the better.