Your first scan

Scanning one page

Open Scan & Fix, pick a page, and run it. A single page is the right place to start: it finishes quickly, and it shows you the shape of the output before you commit to checking everything.

The scan runs in two passes, one on the server and one in your browser. That is explained properly in How scanning works; for now the thing to know is that both have to finish before the numbers are complete.

Scanning everything

Check pages runs across every published post and page. It runs in the background through Action Scheduler, so you can leave the screen and it will carry on. There is no page limit, because nothing here is metered.

A first full scan on a site of any size will take a while. It is not doing anything clever to hurry, because the alternative is a half-finished job that reports a misleadingly low number.

Reading the first result

Expect it to look bad. A first scan on a site nobody has checked before commonly returns hundreds of findings, and the score is usually somewhere in the fifties.

That is not a judgement on your site. It is what happens when 41 checks run against markup that was never written with them in mind, and most of what comes back will be a handful of mistakes repeated across every page by the theme.

Three numbers matter more than the score:

Barriers found. Things an automated check settled. These are wrong and they need fixing.

Needs a person to look. Things automation could not settle. They may be perfectly fine. The plugin is telling you it does not know, rather than guessing.

Fixed. What you have put right so far.

About the score

The score is the average of the most recent score for each scanned page, out of 100. Two things to keep in mind:

• It counts only what automated checks can settle, which is a part of WCAG rather than all of it.
• It does not tell you whether your site meets any legal requirement, and no plugin can. See What it cannot do.

A rising score means you are fixing real things. A score of 100 means the automated checks are satisfied, which is a good day’s work and not the same as an accessible site.

What to do next

The usual order that works:

1. Turn on the site-wide fixes that apply to your theme. One switch can clear the same finding from every page at once.
2. Describe your images. The bulk editor is far faster than opening media items one at a time.
3. Work through what is left, starting with critical and serious.

The dashboard suggests one thing to do next, worked out from your own site. It offers one suggestion at a time, never a checklist, and it goes quiet when there is nothing worth suggesting.