Changes and diffs
Every time Monitor re-checks a page, it compares what it found with that page’s previous check. When a watched attribute is different, Monitor records a change with the value before and after. This is how you find out that a title was rewritten, a canonical moved, or a page started redirecting, and exactly when it happened.
Before you start: Monitor must be enabled for your workspace. It is set up by arrangement, so if you do not see the Monitor icon in the top bar, contact us.
What is compared
Monitor watches these attributes on every page:
| Attribute | Severity recorded with the change |
|---|---|
| HTTP status | Critical |
| Indexability | Critical |
| Canonical link | Critical |
| Robots directives | Critical |
| Redirect target | Critical |
| Page title | Warning |
| H1 heading | Warning |
| Meta description | Warning |
| Hreflang | Warning |
| Structured data (the schema types on the page) | Info |
| Open Graph title | Info |
| Open Graph image | Info |
| Analytics tags | Warning |
| Custom elements you define | Recorded as changes |
To watch a value that is not on this list, such as a price or a published date, add a custom element under Settings > Crawling & extraction. See Monitor site settings.
Body copy, images and scripts are not compared. A page that loses its content is caught by the Empty page check instead. Links are not compared either: broken internal links are reported by the Links to a broken page check. See Issues and severity.
The first check of a page is its baseline, so a newly added page has no changes until its second check.
Which changes email you
A change to status, indexability, canonical, robots directives or redirect target is not emailed as a change. When it breaks something, the matching check opens instead, for example Page not found or Not indexable, so the same event is not reported twice.
A rewritten title, H1 or meta description, or a changed custom element, opens an Info incident: Title changed, H1 changed, Meta description changed or Custom value changed. These appear on the Alerts and Changes tabs but are not emailed by default, because most content edits are your team doing their job. To be emailed about them, raise the check’s severity under Settings > Checks to warning or critical. To hear about an edit on only a few pages, also add an alert rule for that check with a higher Sensitivity.
Analytics tracking disappearing from a page is the exception: Analytics tracking removed is a Warning, and every new site has an alert rule for it, so it can email you without any setup.
When the same change happens on many pages at once, for example a template change, Monitor bundles it into one incident rather than one per page. See Alerts and incidents.
Find a change
The Changes tab lists recorded changes, most recent first. Narrow the list with:
- Period: Last 24 hours, Last 7 days, Last 14 days, Last 30 days or Everything.
- Property: All properties, or one watched attribute.
Each change shows the page and the Before and After values.
The site’s Overview also has a Changes chart of watched attributes that moved, per day, over the last 14 days. For one page’s changes, open the page and select Tracked changes.
Reading a change
The time of a change tells you when Monitor first saw the new value, which is when it re-checked the page, not necessarily the moment the change went live. Important pages are re-checked as often as every 15 minutes, so their changes are timed closely; the least important pages may be up to 24 hours behind.
To trace a change to its cause, compare its time with your deploys, plugin updates and CMS edits around that time. A change that appears on many pages at the same moment usually has one cause, such as a theme, template or plugin update.
Related
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