Let’s Hit the Links!

By GIC Published on May 22nd, 2025

Last updated on May 23rd, 2025

A winning strategy in the face of most challenges is to continually self-evaluate. The very best at any discipline are also able to make course corrections when circumstances change.

Cartoon character shaped like the state of Delaware holding a golf club next to a hole and pin with a Lighthouse in the background.

Here at the GIC, we continue to roll out development of the new Lighthouse design system for your agency’s website. We’re also evaluating our own game in the same ways we are asking of our prospective Lighthouse agencies. As of this posting in May 2025, our own GIC site is not yet using the Lighthouse platform. That means we better get ready!

In the spirit of open-source collaboration and evaluation, we’re going to share our own self-evaluation later in this post to see what type of scores we get for the website you are currently visiting!

So, as we organize our own GIC website content, today we’re going to hit the links; Let’s find out how many broken links are affecting our current site!

We use software called Xenu’s Link Sleuth to conduct these audits. The software is open source and free for anyone to download and use. But be advised, if you are using a Delaware state computer, you will need to request and obtain specific permission from the DTI to download it.

An easier solution is to enlist the consultative assistance of the GIC!

Request an Agency Website Report

We are happy to pull a report of your state agency website, and to point out a few insights that it will uncover!

Some of the things we’ll be looking for:

How many total pages does your website have?
How many inactive or non-functional pages does your site have?
How many PDFs? How many audio or other file types?
How large are your image files?
How many clicks does it take for visitors to reach a service?

What a Xenu report will provide:

A visual, text site map
An accurate inventory of your content
A snapshot of problem areas you can quickly address

GIC Website Self-Audit!

OK, enough stalling!

Let’s take a quick look at how our own GIC site that you are currently visiting holds up under that scrutiny. * gulp! *

Close up of a nervous man's concerned eyes with sweat rolling down his face

We ran a Xenu report on the URL https://gic.delaware.gov, and got a good inventory of the scope and navigational functionality of our site. In the interest of brevity, we’ll only look at the list of Broken Links here now and save the other report features for another time.

There are 1180 total URL calls on the GIC website (This includes individual pages and also the image and other files throughout the site)
97.46% of those URLs are working as intended (hurray!)
The remainder of URLs that are returned as Broken Links include pages not found, time outs waiting for gateway, error messages, no object data.

This represents 25 total problematic URLs on the entire site, so that’s not bad! But can we trust that these are all really not functioning?

Now we’ve got a guide to investigate. We are striving for perfection in an imperfect world, so let’s take a closer look at those links:

A list of 30 URLs from the GIC website that are listed in red as broken links.

We can click on each of these URLs to see what happens. We can also check the referring link to find out what page the problem is on.

The first thing that caught our eye immediately was that this list contained multiple links to resources provided by the federal General Service Administration’s 18F Agency.

This agency provided guidelines for online style and methodology best practices, with a focus on improving government service through technology. In a twist of irony/justice/fate depending on your perspective, the 18F agency was eliminated in early 2025 by the Trump administration’s DOGE Committee in the name of cost savings. All of the associated 18F websites have been shut down, so all of those links are no longer valid on the GIC site.

Continuing through the list, we also notice that the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control website link comes up as broken with a redirect error:

A highlighted line from a report that shows the link to the Delaware DNREC as broken

But when we click on the URL, the page does in fact load, but with a subscription pop-up:

The crawler sees this as a mistake, as it pertains to the pure mission of getting right to dnrec.delaware.gov. Be aware that pop-ups like these can affect search engine rankings for this very reason.

Similarly, the id.delaware.gov page and links to the social media X accounts that the GIC manages are also interrupted by an account sign-in popup. Not much you can do about that, so we’ll live with those, too.

The very first “broken link” in our list is identified as https://kit.fontawesome.com/b5ccd0882b.js.

Its status is the exotic-sounding “Forbidden Request”!

This only shows up as a single item on our list, but when we check the URL properties, we can see that it is being linked to on 102 of our pages!

A little investigation reveals that Fontawesome is the third party that the GIC currently uses for icons.

A screenshot from the Xenu report with the words 102 Links circled in red for emphasis

Its code acts as a middle man between the GIC and the icon imagery in a way that the Link Sleuth doesn’t like. But once again, we’re going to ignore these and take comfort in knowing that Lighthouse will be using a different icon library that should eliminate this confusion.

When all is said and done, we sifted through this result and found a total of 8 legitimate broken links.

An updated list of broken link URLs that has only a few highlighted in red

We’ve eliminated the links that are no longer valid, updated the ones we could, and made our peace with the errors that we’ve decided to live with.

This brings our revised official percentage of non-broken links to 98.21%, which is a percentage that would be higher, but we removed many links altogether and our new total of URLs is smaller than before.

No matter. The important number is that we now have 100% of our links functioning the way we expect and want them to!

When you conduct this type of audit yourself (or when we do it for you), don’t be surprised if the number of broken links is much higher. Many agencies discover that a large amount of their content is outdated and contains links that have been dead for years. We’re looking at you, Covid-19 pages around the planet! Seeing the list can help make some big picture content decisions that can make the lifting a lot easier when it’s time to decide what content comes over to your new Lighthouse site!

Remember to reach out to us if you’d like us to run a Xenu report on behalf of your Delaware state agency.

Also: Be sure to put your agency on the Lighthouse Waitlist!

Calling all Feedback Partners!

We’re looking for developers and Delaware agency web staffers who would like to help us improve Lighthouse!

Lighthouse is now fully available to explore, and we invite developers and agency web editors to dig their hands into the sand and begin to envision their own new Lighthouse websites. This effort is about building a community to provide criticism, suggestions, and enthusiasm for this project.