Scenario · Something looks broken
The reviews widget vanished
“The reviews widget vanished.” Same check for a booking iframe, chat bubble, or map.
A reviews widget, a booking calendar, or a chat bubble can fail in a way nobody notices: it renders nothing, leaves no error, and just looks like blank space on the page — until a client asks why their reviews disappeared. This renders the actual page and reports whether the embed genuinely painted something a visitor could see, catching exactly the failure a quick glance at the page would miss.
What to ask for
See it work
A real run of Embed health check:
FAIL
[error] Instagram feed (instagram) rendered empty: it laid out at 0×0px — nothing visible was returned
empty Instagram feed 0×0
report: ./out/embed-health-check-embed-health-check.html
text: ./out/embed-health-check-embed-health-check.txtThe captured report, exactly as a run hands it to a client —open the full report ↗
Seen in the wild
A fortnightly manual check, answered in 5.2 seconds.
Ticket #12647recurring
Bi-weekly check on the Instagram feed
The task is exactly as it sounds: open the site every fortnight and confirm the Instagram feed is still rendering. It is not difficult, it is not interesting, and it never stops. An embed that silently stops rendering looks completely normal in the page source — the only way to know is to render it and look.
What the check pulled back
| Embed detected | Instagram feed |
|---|---|
| Actually painted | yes |
| Verdict | PASS |
| Check time | 5.2 seconds |
| Ticket to verdict | 42 seconds |
The 42 seconds is the whole loop unattended — reading the ticket, running the check, returning the verdict.
An embed fails by rendering nothing — an empty container that occupies no visible space and raises no error. Nobody notices, because nobody who didn’t build the page knows something should be there. The usual causes: the vendor’s account lapsed, their snippet changed, or a consent tool is quietly blocking the script before it ever loads.
- Run the embed check on the affected public page and save the rendered evidence — a screenshot of an empty container is worth more to whoever fixes this than a verdict alone.
- Read which specific embed failed to paint, and whether the report states a confirmed failure or an honest “could not tell” — the two need different next steps.
- [manual] Check the embed provider’s own dashboard (account still active? snippet changed?) and the page’s integration with the provider or the page’s owner. The check renders and reports; it does not log into anything on either side.
- Retest the exact same public page after the fix and attach the new report to the ticket — “looks fixed” and “proven to render” are different claims.
Invisible in the HTML, visible only to the client
The whole reason this needs a dedicated check: an empty embed produces no error, no broken-image icon, no console warning a casual glance would catch. It looks like intentional whitespace right up until a client asks why their reviews disappeared.
What this does not cover
Whether the embedded content is current, and the fix itself. It renders the page and reports whether each third-party embed actually painted anything; when it cannot tell, it says so and sends it to a human rather than grading it either way. See `third-party-widget-to-add` for the procedure that installs one in the first place.