Storefront

The storefront checks look at your shop the way a customer or a search engine sees it. plinth fetches a sample of the public pages and checks them: search engine fields, structured data, images, links, redirects, security and availability. It only reads pages. It never submits a form and changes nothing in the shop.

Where to find it

Open Shop and customers > Storefront. The page is called Storefront checks and has these tabs:

What you need

• View storefront check results to open the area.
• Run the storefront scan and create tasks to start a scan and to create tasks from issues.
• Storefront check settings for the tab Settings.
• A connected shop with at least one sales channel that has a public address, see Onboarding wizard.

No AI key is needed, and the shop does not have to be writable: the checks only read. Permissions are assigned in Access.

How do I check the shop pages?

1. Open Shop and customers > Storefront.
2. Click Run scan. The message "Scan started. The result will appear in a moment." appears, and the progress is shown on the page.
3. When the scan is done, the header shows the time of the last scan and how many issues were found on how many addresses.

The scan fetches only a sample: the home page, some categories, products and landing pages, the search, cart and sign-in page, and a few addresses from the sitemap. It respects robots.txt and limits the number of requests per second.

Note: If the scan is marked Incomplete, the request limit was reached before all pages were checked. The limits are in the settings.

How do I read the result?

1. Open the tab Overview.
2. The tiles at the top show the Open issues, the issues per severity (Critical, High, Medium, Low) and the Checks without issues. Click a tile to filter the list.
3. The table lists every check with its Severity, Group, and the numbers Open, New and Fixed. New counts issues that were not there in the scan before. Fixed counts issues that no longer occurred.
4. Use the search field to find a check or a group.
5. Expand a row to see the affected addresses. Click the row to open the check with all addresses.

The checks are sorted into these groups:

How urgent is an issue?

How do I look at one check or one address?

One check

1. In the tab Overview, click the row of the check.
2. The page explains the check and lists every address with an open issue, with a Detail, the Status and First seen.
3. If a help article exists for the check, the button Help opens it.

One address

1. Click an address in a check, or open the tab Checked pages and click an address there.
2. Under Issues for this URL you see every open issue of this address. Where it helps, the Offending snippet shows the part of the page that caused the issue.
3. The page also shows the Final URL, the number of redirects, and under Response headers (excerpt) the headers the shop sent.

The tab Checked pages shows for every address the Type (for example Home page, Category, Product), the Status, the Redirects and the Time (ms). A status of 200 is fine, 3xx is a redirect, 4xx and 5xx are errors.

How do I fix an issue?

The storefront checks only report. You fix the cause where it comes from, then run the scan again.

1. Fix the cause.
2. Click Run scan again.
3. Check that the issue is gone. Fixed issues are listed in the tab History under Recently fixed.

How do I hand an issue over as a task?

You need Run the storefront scan and create tasks.

1. Open the check.
2. Click Create task. The dialog Task from this check shows how many addresses have an open issue.
3. Enter a Title and, if you like, a Description.
4. Choose Assign to: Me, Role or Nobody. For a role, choose the Role.
5. Optional: set Due on and a Priority.
6. Click Create task.

The task contains all affected addresses and appears in the tasks of Quality.

How do I see what changed over time?

1. Open the tab History.
2. Scan history lists the past scans: when, the Trigger (Manual or Schedule), the number of Pages and Requests, the issues, and the Result (Done or Failed).
3. Recently fixed lists issues that no longer occur, with First seen and Fixed on.

How do I change the settings?

You need Storefront check settings. Open the tab Settings.

Click Save. The message "Saved." appears.

Warning: For a test shop, set Search engine visibility to Pages should carry noindex (test shop). For the live shop it must be Pages should be indexable. With the wrong choice, every page is reported or real problems are missed.

Note: plinth only fetches the addresses of the sales channels of this shop and the hosts you list. Redirects to other addresses are not followed.

Common errors and fixes

See also

• Categories: edit texts and SEO fields of category and brand pages
• Quality: checks for product data, and the tasks
• Feeds: checks for Google Shopping and Meta
• Jobs: running and finished scans