Two spooky Craft quirks that could be lurking on your site

Every now and then, even a well-maintained site can let a few bugs slip through the cracks. With fall officially in full swing, now seems like an appropriate time to mention these spooky quirks that could be laying dormant on your site. The good news is that both of these issues have straightforward solutions once you know what you're looking for.

1. Styles, classes, elements, oh my!

We've all been there: you copy a freshly completed block of content from a Word document and paste it directly into a CKEditor field. Suddenly, text that should match your site's design has gone rogue, adding fonts, colors, and spacing issues that seem to appear out of thin air.

While admittedly, it is convenient to draft up your content in places like Google Docs, Word, or your favorite AI tool, this usually ends up creating more issues in the long run.

What's going on? Oftentimes, when content is copied from external sources, it can carry hidden inline styles and classes along for the ride. These ghost-like hitchhikers override your site's CSS, creating inconsistent formatting that might seem impossible to track down if you didn't know any better. But luckily for you, the solution to your problem is just a small change in workflow.

The solution: This is where CKEditor's built-in tools come in handy.

• Write directly in CKEditor to avoid introducing unwanted styles entirely.
• If you want to continue writing your content elsewhere, right-clicking and using the "Paste as plain text" option strips formatting entirely.
• Take advantage of CKEditor's built-in formatting tools that were specifically configured for your site.

This small workflow adjustment will keep you safe from the unknown, and will potentially save hours of troubleshooting mysterious styling issues down the road.

2. Links that lead to nowhere

Deleting an old entry seems harmless right? Well, it is... for the most part. But once in a while it can have consequences that haunt your site just a little. Imagine this: you disable or delete an entry, and for a few days everything seems fine.

But what may not have been realized is that very entry was embedded elsewhere and now leads visitors to a catch-all page, which is frightening for user experience.

What's happening: When you remove an entry, Craft doesn't warn you that the specific entry is linked elsewhere. Your site still has the ghost of the very entry you removed out in broad daylight.

The next time you want to delete an entry, you may feel like you need to play the role of a detective and find every instance that it may (or may not) be linked to, but fortunately that is not the case.

The fix: Set up passive monitoring on your site to catch any broken links with tools such as:

• Retour Plugin: This plugin is an awesome tool to add to your site's toolbelt. Not only does it track 404s, but it also gives you the ability to redirect visitors to the right place.
• OhDear! Monitoring: For our retainer clients, we use Oh Dear to monitor broken links in real-time. It catches these problems before your visitors do.

The scary truth is that at this time there is no way of truly knowing if you're deleting an entry that is embedded somewhere on your site, but there are precautions you can take to monitor these cases to ensure you can take care of them as they arise.

Keeping the quirks away

These issues might seem small, but they add up, and can take away your site's polished feel that you have worked so hard to establish. If you're encountering persistent formatting nightmares or worried about hidden 404s, our team can help audit your site and implement monitoring solutions that give you peace of mind.

Need help keeping your Craft site running smoothly? Get in touch to talk through your project and how we can support your ongoing maintenance needs.