What Gets Checked Before a Template, Plugin, or Component Ships to the Marketplace
Every marketplace submission runs through automated gates and human-scored judgment before it's listed — here's what that review actually checks.
Every template, plugin, component, and vector graphic submitted to the Piskes Website Builder marketplace goes through a dedicated review process before it's listed — and we're publishing what that process actually checks.
Automated gates first
Each submission type — templates, plugins, components, vector assets — runs through its own checker built for what that type of submission can get wrong. A template's checker alone covers a wide range of ground: accessibility basics like focus visibility and skip links, performance budgets including image dimensions and Core Web Vitals, SEO fundamentals like heading structure and meta consistency, responsive behavior across a viewport matrix, and whether the template is actually built to be customized rather than hard-coded. It also scans for the telltale signs a submission was never finished — leftover "Lorem ipsum," bracketed placeholder text, stray TODOs.
Human judgment where a machine can't decide
Beyond the automated gates, a reviewer scores a set of criteria a checker can't — craft, originality, whether the thing is actually useful — on a 1-to-5 scale. The bar that matters is the lowest score across every criterion, not the average: a submission with beautiful execution and no real purpose doesn't get to average its way past a genuine weakness, which is exactly the failure mode that fills a marketplace with pretty, useless listings.
Proven, not assumed
The template checker specifically has a planted-failure test in its own test suite — a deliberately broken submission that must fail review — so the review process is verified to actually catch bad submissions, not just assumed to.
This has been the standard since the marketplace opened; we're documenting it now for anyone weighing whether a smaller marketplace's listings can be trusted.