Website Spell Checkers

Having spelling mistakes all over the place can really undermine the credibility of your website. But what if you don’t have the time or patience to spell check everything yourself? Well, there are some resources that you can use for this purpose.

The Online Solution

TextTrust appears to be one of the best online alternatives. I inserted the URL of Daily Blog Tips into their free trial utility and within 30 minutes I received an email with nine sample pages from my site that contained spelling mistakes.

Unfortunately the service is not so useful for blogs since most of the mistakes will come from your comments (hopefully they will fix that in the near future). Despite this fact, however, the service is pretty good. They offer both an “Express” version which will spell check all the pages on your domain for $125 and a subscription version where you pay $20 monthly in exchange for weekly reports containing mistakes on your pages.

Not the cheapest of the services, but could be worth if you run a business website where spelling mistakes are not tolerated.

The Software

If you run several websites perhaps instead of purchasing a one-time review you could buy a program and use it over and over again. InSite will both spell check your website and look for broken links.

The software costs $49. There is a free trial version as well, but it is limited to only one website and it lacks some of the advanced features.

If you are more concerned with spell checking your posts and comments, you can check another article I wrote titled “Tools and Resources for Spell Checking.“

Daniel Scocco on August 23, 2007 Subscribe to our RSS Feed

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15 Responses to “Website Spell Checkers”

Katy on August 23rd, 2007 3:53 am

Not an automated solutions like the ones above but Firefox 2 has a built in spellchecker for text-area (it doesn’t seem to work on WYSIWYG editors though). For Internet Explorer users there’s IESpell (free for personal use). Both are really handy to check spelling whilst you’re adding a blog entry
Daniel on August 23rd, 2007 3:55 am

Katy, sometime ago I wrote a similar post on the SponsoredReviews blog, but it was focused on spell checking your posts indeed.

I just updated the post with a link at the bottom, thanks for the heads up.
Eli on August 23rd, 2007 4:00 am

It’s not always spelling mistakes though, for me, it’s often using a completely wrong word, so when read it makes very little sense.
Daniel on August 23rd, 2007 4:01 am

Eli, yeah spell checkers are no substitute for proof reading, that is for sure :).
Brennan on August 23rd, 2007 4:52 am

I actually use Firefox’s built-in spellchecker. For me it works in both righting code and the actual post.

The one place it doesn’t seem to work is in the post header. For that, I take any word I’m not sure looks right, and enter it in Google search. That’ll tell me if it’s spelled correctly.
Martin on August 23rd, 2007 5:57 am

Brennan - Firefox spell checker works in the post header for me …

I like to copy and paste my post into Microsoft Word to check spelling and grammar. Spelling is not a problem for me (because of Firefox), but grammar always is.
Daniel on August 23rd, 2007 7:22 am

By the way the point of the post was not to spell check posts or what you write, but rather your whole website :).

If you have a website with 200 or more pages, it would be cumbersome to copy and paste each of them into Word or into a Firefox form to check for spelling mistakes.
johno on August 23rd, 2007 7:47 am

The TextTrust tool is a great idea. The coding behind it wouldn’t be particularly complex, so I’m surprised there aren’t some cheaper competitors (perhaps I should have a go).

ps: Found a couple of typos:
“If you run several websites perhaps instead of purchasing a one time review you could buy a software and use it over and over again.”

Should read:
“If you run several websites perhaps instead of purchasing a one-time review you could buy software and use it over and over again.”

I’m off to correct all the spelling errors and typos on my own site
Daniel on August 23rd, 2007 7:58 am

johno, fixed it, which reminds us that spell checking is not enough!
engtech @ internet duct tape on August 23rd, 2007 8:32 am

I just use the Firefox built-in spellchecker. Works well, and works with the WordPress rich text editor.
Nathan Chapman on August 23rd, 2007 1:15 pm

I use wordpress for my blog, and so I use a plug-in that check my spelling at the editing stage. I can’t remember what it’s called *sorry*

Also, it would be nice to see a comment-spellchecker like on digg when you post an article.
Jake on December 13th, 2007 1:39 am

http://www.spellery.com is a pretty straitforward way to spell check your website.
Kevin Garber on May 19th, 2008 10:38 am

Hi All

We have launched just the tool for you folk. It is now in beta, but will check your site with a whole heap of nifty options.

Automatically spell checks your website, provides screenshots of errors, custom dictionary, multiple languages ..

Feel free to register.

Hope that you find it useful.

Kevin - spellr.us
http://spellr.us
Brian Maloney on June 25th, 2008 12:25 am

Hi. I represent TextTrust and I can answer any questions about our service. I also can run a sample spell check of any site and offer more suggestions for anyone, as well as make sure you have any current promotion we are offering. My site is http://www.TextTrustSpellCheck.blogspot.com.

TextTrust has surpassed the 81,000,000 pages check and continues to grow! Our clients like the fact that we have real, live editors previewing all reports to eliminate the false-positives to deliver only REAL mistakes to our clients. We are the ONLY company in the world that offers this service, and proud of it!

Write me at brian@maloney.com or Skype me at brian-maloney.

Spell checking the Globe — every week!
Brian