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p/passmarked-comA community-driven website quality score
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James Docherty

Passmarked - Simple, all-in-one test to check the quality of your website

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Passmarked is THE tool I've been looking for to check the quality of websites (mine & clients'). The open source list of tests makes it incredibly useful and flexible for integrating into the development workflow. It's only just been launched but there's already a tremendous amount of coverage that will only get better as more people contribute.

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Johann du Toit
Maker
We did point our friends to the post out of pure excitement, can confirm it's all them. Was that bad?
Johann du Toit
Maker
@dainiskanopa Don't know what to tell you my man, had an announcement on Facebook and Twitter that we are on ProductHunt and they should go check it out and vote if they like.
Karen Breytenbach
Maker
@johann_du_toit @dainiskanopa Hi Dainis, anyone is welcome to investigate. There are no bought votes. It’s the truth.
James Docherty
Hunter
@dainiskanopa I have no specific interest in this (I'm not affiliated with Passmarked in any way) but having hunted the product after I found it and was surprised it wasn't on PH, I have watched votes come in. Here's an observation: the majority of the accounts you link to do seem to have real-looking Twitter accounts and a lot of them seem to have South African looking names. So, perhaps rather than buying votes, the people involved (South Africans I think) just managed to convince their real-world friends to join PH to vote for them? So that would explain why the accounts are all new. Of course it may have cost them a beer in the real world but I can't really see what's wrong with that :-) As I said, I have no "inside knowledge" so have no idea but let's not get distracted, the product IS a great idea!
Johann du Toit
Maker
@dainiskanopa @jmdocherty you are exactly correct :). Pretty much the folks throughout the years that helped us build and shape the system. I owe a few people beers haha
Johann du Toit
Maker
Hi James (and people of ProductHunt)! What a nice surprise to be hunted - thank you! We’re glad you enjoy Passmarked.com. Just like you we also found ourselves looking for a tool or platform that could help us to quickly and easily scan our own and client websites for various common web issues - including security, performance, compatibility and content/SEO issues. We hoped to find something that could guide us on all known web standards, and how to fix any errors that were found based on those standards. But couldn’t find anything like it. So we built it. And then we made it open-source so that it could become an open, universal, community-driven standard for the web (in the spirit of the internet that Tim Berners-Lee dreamt of for the world). We want people everywhere, whether they access the internet on their mobile phones, with very little data, or whether they are visually impaired, or whether they just want to browse safely, to have a good internet experience. We also wanted to make developers’ lives easier. It took almost four years of hard work, midnight oil, and contributions from developers from all over. And so Passmarked.com was built for developers, by developers. People like you, who build your own websites and who want to test how well their sites are working, either just before or after launching, or continue to make sure there are no glitches creeping in. The timing of this hunt is really kind of uncanny. We’ve just come out of beta, rather quietly, four days ago and we just announced a bunch of really cool new features in a newsletter to our community. We were just starting to talk about the new developments publicly on Twitter this week and planned to start doing some PR. So you caught us a little off guard, but thanks! Please ask us questions - we are here to chat! And please follow us on Twitter @passmarked too. Still figuring out the whole scaling thing so please report issues there as well :)!
James Docherty
Hunter
@passmarked @johann_du_toit Hi Johann - I think the fact it's taken you 4 years to build really shows in what I've seen so far. Prior to finding Passmarked I've been using a bunch of different tools (Pagespeed, Lighthouse, SSLlabs, mxtoolbox etc.) but it's sooooo good to have everything in one place (and the CLI gets me pretty excited too). I didn't know you've only just come out of beta (!) but was surprised it wasn't on PH and thought it would be useful to others (sorry if it caught you on the hop!). Since you've just gone public, is there anything you want to draw my/PHers attention to that I missed when I hunted it? Keep up the GREAT work, James Ps. I love the fact that it's free - that'll really help me refer it to clients for a "quick sanity check" :-)
Johann du Toit
Maker
@passmarked @jmdocherty Hey James, what's life without a hop or two ;) Okay. Here is some good news that we can share with everyone (that we just only shared with our newsletter subscribers): * We’re building a community, so as soon as you sign up on the site you’ll get a Slack invitation so that we can talk to each other. * Passmarked is free for humans forever - this means as long as we’re around you can test your sites free a page at a time. If you want more around the clock monitoring or support, there are packages (which are not expensive!). * We’re really excited about some awesome new features that are helpful to our community, including Lighthouse PWA integration and DNS Server security checks. * Passmarked is now also available in all phases or environments of the website building process, including local staging and production (or anything on a local network), using the Passmarked API/CLI. This is good news for a lot of people who have been asking for it. Previously only live websites could be tested, but we changed that after some consultation with the community. * And then, we’re super excited about our next mission to build in the full gamut of accessibility / a11y checks. We invite the web accessibility community to join hands with us to create a great open-source database of accessibility checks, for the community, by the community. We have an awesome new CEO Mark McChlery. You can say hi on Twitter @MarkMcChlery. Any other questions? Bring it on! :) Thanks Johann & the team
James Docherty
Hunter
@passmarked @markmcchlery @johann_du_toit I absolutely LOVE that I can run tests on a local site before it's live - sooo freakin' GREAT...I'm digging into the docs now. Make sure you hit up @paul_irish and the other web standards guys to get this some more PH love...I think it really deserves it! Thanks for an awesome product.
Jeff Osborn
Love the product idea and like the experience in using it so far. Looking forward to digging in deeper to the reports. Thanks for making @johann_du_toit and team! BTW @dainiskanopa I'm a real human & I don't know the PassedMarked team ;)
Dainis Kanopa
@jeff_osborn Hey I am not saying everyone is fake and etc. But just look upvoters right behind you: https://www.producthunt.com/@fedir https://www.producthunt.com/@rys... https://www.producthunt.com/@_ka... https://www.producthunt.com/@pol... https://www.producthunt.com/@ste... https://www.producthunt.com/@ilo... All upvotes come from new users with fake profiles created. Okay I give up, Ph doesn't care this, I don't care too! Please don't comment me. I really don't care you guys trying to explain everything.
Karen Breytenbach
Maker
@johann_du_toit @jeff_osborn Thanks Jeff, appreciate the support. Hope you'll join us on the Passmarked Slack support channel so that we can help you if ever you have questions.
Jeff Osborn
@fedir @ryszardlesiak @_karlvonbahnhof @polinakl @stelladi @ilona_arbatskaya @dainiskanopa Haha I don't know these guys, just looks like a cool product. If anyone buys upvotes on PH the joke's on them. I can't think of a bigger waste of money when developing a product.
Karen Breytenbach
Maker
@jeff_osborn we don't even know how to buy votes! :)
James Docherty
Hunter

The tool I wish I'd built!

Pros:

Not upselling me a "quick fix" (like most "grade my site" tools)

open source = transparency

community driven weighting & docs

free

Cons:

Not found any so far (only a day in!) :-)

Mark
Thanks for this James. We will never upsell on a fix, just how many pages you want to test. Our vision is to become a consensus backed standard. Diluting this with functional upsell offers works against this.
Mark
check th issuu article above (if you haven't already) page 48-49. Genuinely... thanks for your support today.
Karen Breytenbach
Maker
Thank you everyone for your support so far. Yesterday morning was just a normal day in the office, and a day later, we're #3 on ProductHunt and the votes keep climbing every time I look. It's all a little surreal. Thank you to everyone who voted for us. Your interest and validation means a lot to us, so thank you. Thank you James for sticking your neck out for a startup on the other side of the world that you didn't know from a bar of soap until yesterday lunchtime. I'd also like to thank the people who helped us build Passmarked.com over the years. There were many random devs, open-source and web development enthusiasts and other techies from all corners of the globe who contributed via Github. There were many early mentors who taught us many lessons - one of the harder ones was from @BramK when we were still a little green, and it was very valuable. A massive thank you to all our designer and dev friends at io.co.za who helped us build this beast of a site, who shared their office with us, who gave us beer on Fridays. Jacques, Carlin, Tristan and Ludwig, thank you for all the beautiful artworks. Thank you Sarah Rice for your amazing insights and copy. But I also need to take the liberty to thank the core team: @Johann_du_Toit our lead dev and head of R&D, who put in enormous amounts of hard work through the night, for nearly four years, and co-founder @barry_botha1 who never stopped believing, building and also sometimes coding, keeping us together through ups and downs, and the amazing @markmcchlery who recently joined us formally as CEO, but who has been a friend of this team for a very long time. And last but not least thank you to the online community, especially on Twitter, who have been giving us lots of little nudges and kept us inspired. As we told our newsletter database last week when we came out of beta, and being a proudly African startup, we leave you with the words of the great Nelson Mandela: “It is in your hands to create a better world for all who live in it.”
Johann du Toit
Maker
Well howdy folks, I'm powering up more servers to get the site faster. Stick with me I'll get us nice and fast again :)
Johann du Toit
Maker
Nothing like some load to really test the hatches, disabling and fixing tests that are not coping with the load in case you spot a test there and not there in subsequent runs :)
Johann du Toit
Maker
I'm catching up with you guys, slowly getting ahead thanks for the patience servers took forever to start :|
Mark

Passmarked lies at the core of web standards; specifically at the intersection of trust, code, data and software development.

Pros:

open sourced, democratised test suite

Cons:

site needs to speak to a more diverse audience IRO UX and CMS

Frank Denbow
Very cool product and implementation. Are there any sites that actually perform well with your test? Seems like every site has a lot of reported issues, trying to understand if all are worth fixing
Karen Breytenbach
Maker
@frank_denbow Hi Frank, our test results are very comprehensive and sometimes it won’t make real sense to spend time on fixing every little error. That’s why the issues are divided into four levels of seriousness (from critical errors down to far less serious warnings). I would say always fix the serious issues first, then use your discretion about the little ones. As long as your site is safe, searchable, mobile/friendly and fast enough. It’s quite subjective and what you decide on fixing depends on your own needs. You decide if it is more important to have web security or if SEO is a bigger priority. Perfection is something we can all strive for (especially when we know what to fix) but for us at passmarked empowering people with useful information (so that they can make their own decisions and save some valuable time along the way) is more important.
Mark
@frank_denbow @karen_breytenbach @johann_du_toit : Hi Frank, to expand on Karen's response I would like to reiterate our vision protocol; in that the platform compares individual website code to the consensus structure and format most up to date at the time of the test. We have the full source repo available open-sourced on our Github page. I take your point that it looks like heaps of errors, and the short answer is that we have recently included progressive web app source code to the mix under the Lighthouse heading. Naturally with every new layer added to the internet there are consequences (intended or not) in the most unexpected places. This includes some accessibility tests as well. The fact that all other test products available on the web, or off the shelf, are isolated to one or or a cluster of core elements (language, Format, DB, Security, SEO) At first blush the Passmarked test looks overwhelming considering that one has probably never seen a consolidated overarching analysis outside of a manually collated DevOps report and documentation process... Or at least that is what we are counting on. We have also built an API/CLI, for Devops to test in the SDLC at any point (even on local staging environments) and we can even integrate to workflows to manage regression rules and testing on the fly. Why wait to the day before 'Go Live" ?? Lastly we have purposely built it to allow individuals to up or down vote on every rule we test. Our AI runs in the background and follows the community consensus with dynamic weighting; based on proposers profile, known commits etc balanced with the aggregate sentiment on the particular rule. Hope this helps. Please join our slack channel (the link is on our site under community and feel free to email me (mark@passmarked.com) or Johann (Johann@passmarked.com) directly if you would like to explore our madness a little deeper. Have a cracker day. Best Mark
Adam Reis
There seem to be some issues with reports mixing up results from different sites. I was testing our own site, when it suddenly complained of non minified CSS (ours is minified). Upon closer inspection, it complained about a source that seems to belong to another website altogether. No idea where it got that reference from, as we don't include this particular file anywhere on our site. Maybe something to look into and for others be aware of when checking your own sites. Also reporting some other false issues which upon close inspection are not reproducible in a "real" browser, as well as complaining about invalid HTML attributes when using SPA's like Angular. So all in all might need some work to be fully usable for production websites.
Mark
Hi @adamreisnz What you have picked up has occurred 4 times since yesterday and we are working on the cache bug as we speak. Fully appreciate your comment and will update you once we have committed the correction. It is also important to point out that we have built this for consensus evolution so it would be equally helpful (now and in the long term) if you up or down vote on a rule and submit an issue (or if you are inclined; a fix) to our Github repo https://github.com/passmarked-pa.... Please drop me a mail mark@passmarked our join our slack channel as well. many thanks Mark
Karen Breytenbach
Maker
@adamreisnz Hi Adam, we are aware of these issues and our team is working on fixing it. Thank you for giving us your feedback - we're always working on improving the platform.
Adam Reis
@karen_breytenbach Thanks guys, yes I've downvoted some rules that I found were not very useful, but there were also a few that simply reported incorrect results. Downvoting didn't seem like the appropriate course of action there? Maybe a button to report broken rules would be useful.
Nat Collins
It would be nice if there were a sample report, or one free report, so I can judge whether the reports are actually reporting things I care about.
Mark
@natcollins We have capacity to let you have a voucher. Email me ( mark@passmarked.com ) what you are looking at and I'll create a POC voucher for you. Also have a look at https://passmarked.com/docs Regards Mark
Karen Breytenbach
Maker
@natcollins Hi Nat, you can do a free one page test to get an idea of what the report looks like and what gets tested. We also have a producthunt voucher code promo running - you'll find it on the top of the passmarked home page. Let us know if you get stuck. Cheers.
Nat Collins
@karen_breytenbach @markmcchlery Thanks for the report! It caught stuff I indeed want to fix. I like how you have links to how to fix the stuff too.
Gerjo Hoffman

PH should pay Passmarked for all the new aquisitions.

Pros:

Great overall product

Cons:

Needs further community participation, but great start.

kayd

I like it! I used it my website

Pros:

Perfect for testing your website very quickly and get reports

Cons:

none so far

Jason
Seems like it might be useful, but why does it insist every single website I've tested is pulling in an asset from http://architecturalstructures.n...? Also, I tried to submit a minor spelling error, and the button to send in my suggested change did nothing. Since the button was enabled, I assumed it should work and eventually just gave up. If the user needs to log in first, that should be made more clear.
Karen Breytenbach
Maker
@jaydepot Hi Jay, thank you for flagging. We are looking into it and we'll get back to you shortly.
Nate Davis

The fact that everything is in one place and that some of it is community driven has been amazing for actually learning beyond quick fixes.

Pros:

1 month in and this is the best website optimization tool I have ever used

Cons:

None when compared to any other tool in the category.