Did I leave placeholder text or test links on my live site?

Updated 2026-10-17

Short answer: launch leftovers are easy to miss because you stop seeing them: a lorem ipsum paragraph, a link or image still pointing at localhost or a staging address, a copyright year from three years ago. Visitors notice, and dev links simply don't work for them.

How to check it yourself

  1. Search the live pages' source for lorem, localhost, 127.0.0.1, staging and .local.
  2. Click through footer and menu links, logged out, in a private window.
  3. Check the copyright year in the footer.
  4. Search your CMS or code for the leftovers and replace them.

Why it matters

Placeholder text makes a site look unfinished to visitors and clients, and links to localhost or a staging address are broken for everyone except the developer who built the site. Both are easy to miss on a quick visual check, because they often sit in footers, buttons or pages you don't open every day.

Common causes

  • Theme demo content was imported and some of it never replaced.
  • Content was built on a local or staging site and copied over with the old addresses inside.
  • Hard-coded links in a theme or page builder point at the development address.
  • A page or section was added as a draft and published by mistake.

What Preventionlabs shows

Every report's page basics check looks for placeholder text (lorem ipsum), links to development addresses such as localhost, a stale copyright year, whether the favicon and homepage images actually load, the page language and link previews (Open Graph).

Price

First report free, no card needed. Then A$50 a month, up to 10 domains.

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