What is WWJD?

What Would JavaScript Do? identifies the JavaScript-generated elements of a web page and provides a multifaceted look at how a page works without any JavaScript enabled.

What does WWJD show?

WWJD creates a report divided into four categories:

- Screenshot - This is a visual comparison between a screenshot of the page with JavaScript enabled and a screenshot of the same page with JavaScript disabled.

- HTML - This displays the source code and the rendered DOM, allowing you to compare the two.

- Meta - This compares the tags (most notably the title, description, meta robots, and canonical tags) before and after JavaScript is rendered.

- Links - This shows you any links that were injected into the document by JavaScript.

How do you use WWJD?

We recommend starting with the visual comparison of the generated screenshots. It’s the easiest way to check which elements of the page are affected by JavaScript.

Then through the Meta and Links tabs, you can discover the differences that weren’t necessarily visible on the screenshots. You can check if your page’s title or meta descriptions are influenced by JavaScript outside of your control and you can see if JavaScript injects any links that are not present in the plain HTML. In the case of meta tags, the tool always displays the title, meta description, robots, and canonical tags. Other tags are only displayed if a difference is detected between the rendered and non-rendered versions.

The HTML report is where you can examine the issues more closely by looking at the source code and compare it with the DOM rendered by the browser.

If considerable differences exist between the rendered and non-rendered version of your page, your users may not be able to see some of your content. That’s because you can never be sure as to when your JavaScript-powered content gets picked up by the search engines. Consider contacting us so that we can address this issue together.

What’s coming up next for WWJD?

The WWJD tool is currently in beta. We are working on implementations that will allow the tool to highlight the differences between the generated screenshots.