JavaScript errors

Silktide records the JavaScript errors and warnings that occur while your pages load. These often mean part of your page is not working, such as a menu, form, or widget that silently fails for visitors.

Why this matters

When fails, whatever it powers stops working - and the failure is invisible unless someone opens the browser's developer tools. Visitors just experience a button that does nothing or a form that won't submit, and most will leave rather than report it. An error can also halt other scripts on the page, so one broken third-party script can take your own features down with it.

Error messages can additionally reveal more than you intend, such as internal file paths or hints about your infrastructure, to anyone who looks at the browser console.

How to fix it

These findings are for a developer to review:

Reproduce the error by opening the page in a browser with the developer console open. The recorded stack trace shows where the error came from.
Fix errors in your own code, and update or remove broken third-party scripts. A script that references a service you no longer use is a common source.
Not every error breaks something a visitor cares about. If an error is benign and outside your control, the finding so it isn't raised again - though fixing it keeps the console clean for the errors that matter.

How Silktide tests this

Load each page in a real browser, running scripts just as a visitor's browser would.
Record every error and warning the page produces in the browser console while loading, whether from your code or third-party scripts.
Report each message with a stack trace showing where it originated.

Troubleshooting

I don't see the error on my machine

Errors can depend on timing, network conditions, or browser state - for example, a script that fails only when an ad blocker is absent, or only on a cold cache. The stack trace recorded with the finding shows what failed during Silktide's visit even if you can't reproduce it.

The error comes from a third-party script

You can't fix their code, but you control whether to load it. Check for an updated version of the script, or remove the service if you no longer use it.