Placeholder pages
Silktide finds pages that appear to be unfinished, such as pages saying "under construction" or still containing "lorem ipsum" filler text. These pages are usually created with good intentions and then forgotten.
Why this matters
A placeholder page is a promise your website never kept. Visitors who reach one get nothing useful and a clear signal that the site is not maintained - "under construction" pages in particular tend to stay up for years. Filler text like "lorem ipsum" is worse: it shows the page was published before anyone finished writing it, which reflects on the care behind everything else you publish.
These pages also get indexed by search engines, so people can arrive at your least finished content directly from a search.
How to fix it
- Finish the page: replace the placeholder text with the real content it was created for.
- If the content is never coming, remove the page and redirect its address to the most relevant existing page.
- If the flagged text is legitimate - for example, a page that genuinely discusses the "lorem ipsum" convention - the finding.
How Silktide tests this
- Read the main body text of each page.
- If the page has a substantial amount of content (500 characters or more), it is never treated as a placeholder, whatever it says.
- Otherwise, look for placeholder phrases - "under construction" and "lorem ipsum" - and report the page if one is found, highlighting the matching text.
- Pages that redirect visitors elsewhere are not reported, and your website's error page is deliberately excluded.
Troubleshooting
A finished page is flagged
If a short page happens to contain a flagged phrase - say, a design blog mentioning lorem ipsum - the check cannot tell it apart from a true placeholder. Approve the finding, or expand the page beyond 500 characters of body text.
A page I know is unfinished isn't flagged
The check only recognises specific placeholder phrases on short pages. An unfinished page with no such phrase, or one padded with enough text, won't be detected - see the Empty pages check for pages with no content at all.