YLB ScoreYLB Score › The checks, explained › Part III, Will a stranger trust you?
Your social icons do not lead anywhere
The Facebook logo is in your footer. A visitor taps it, and nothing happens, because the picture was never given a link. It happens more than you would think: the icon is part of the page design, and the address was never filled in.
Every icon on the page should open something. If a profile does not exist, take the icon down.
Worth about 1 point of your 100 for a typical businessAbout 5 min, by your web person
See for yourself
On your phone, tap each social icon on your homepage. Each one should open a page.
How to fix it
- Give every social icon the address of the profile it represents.
- Remove icons for platforms you are not actually on.
The technical version, for your web person
dead icons. Any element whose class, alt, title or image path names a platform (fa-facebook, elementor-social-icon-facebook, instagram.png) whose nearest link has no href, an empty or # href, or a javascript: href, or has no link at all. We do not fetch the profiles themselves: LinkedIn and Facebook answer a bot with a login page, so a 404 test would accuse people wrongly.
What the check reads. Any element whose class, aria-label, title, alt, src or href names a platform (fa-facebook, elementor-social-icon-facebook, /img/instagram.png ...) is an icon; if its nearest anchor has no href, href="#" or a javascript: href, or there is no anchor at all, the icon is dead and the point is lost with the finding social_dead_icons ('your social icons do not lead anywhere'). Whether a linked profile URL still resolves is NOT fetched: LinkedIn and Facebook answer a bot with 999/login pages, so a 404 check would produce false accusations.
This is one of the checks in a YLB Score report. Every report is free, read by a person before it goes out, and written so that you can act on it without us. Ask for yours.