Issues and severity
Every problem Monitor finds is a check that a page, or the whole site, is failing. Each check has a severity, which decides how prominently it is shown and whether it can email you. You can change a check’s severity, switch a check off, or stop reporting it where it does not apply.
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.
The three severities
| Severity | What it means | Can email you by default? | Examples of checks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Critical | The page or site is broken, or is out of search | Yes | Page not found, Not indexable, Title missing, Links to a broken page, Canonical points at an excluded page, The site is not responding |
| Warning | Something is wrong and worth fixing soon | Yes | Page redirects, Canonical missing, Meta description missing, Duplicate title, Multiple H1s, Empty page |
| Info | Advice, or a change worth knowing about | No | Thin content, Images missing alt text, Heading level skipped, Structured data missing, Canonical points elsewhere, Title changed |
By default, only Warning and Critical findings can email you. Info findings are shown in the app but do not interrupt anyone. Whether a Warning or Critical finding on your pages actually sends an email depends on the site’s alert rules, which by default wait until enough pages are affected. To see and change those rules, see Alerts and incidents.
Some checks change severity with evidence. Page unreachable (a timeout, refused connection or 5xx response) is Info on the first failure and becomes Critical when the next check fails too, so a single blip does not page anyone. A 429 or 503 response is reported as Rate limited, which is Info.
A noindex is not reported on pages where it is expected.
The Issues tab
The Issues tab shows the site’s Website health score out of 1,000, Health per segment, and every check grouped by category. For each category, it shows how many pages are affected and how much health fixing them would recover.
Each check has one of these states:
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Open | Failing on at least one page |
| Closed | Checked and passing |
| Ignored | Reporting was stopped for it |
| Not checked yet | Monitor has not evaluated it yet |
| Not required here | Does not need to pass on these pages |
| Not applicable | Could not apply to these pages |
Open a check to see the pages it affects, the evidence, and How to fix it. On a page’s detail screen, Edit in Workover or Edit in WordPress takes you to where you can fix it, when Monitor can link there. See Pages and crawl activity.
Change a check’s severity
- Open the site’s Settings tab, then Checks.
- Find the check under Per-page checks or Whole-site checks.
- Choose critical, warning or info in its severity list.
To switch a check off for the whole site, clear its checkbox in the same list. These settings do not affect the platform checks on the Platform tab, such as uptime, the certificate and robots.txt.
Stop reporting a finding
Some findings are correct but do not matter for your site, for example a thin page that is short on purpose. You can stop reporting a finding instead of switching the whole check off.
Warning: A check switched off for a segment or the whole site stays silent even if it later fails for a real reason. Prefer On this page only when you are not sure.
- Open the page from the Pages tab, or from the check on the Issues tab.
- In the page’s list of checks, expand the open finding.
- Select This is fine, stop reporting it.
Choose where to stop reporting it:
On this page only. Other pages keep reporting it. If the page changes, the finding comes back.
Everywhere in a segment. Applies to every page in that segment, including pages added later.
Across the whole site. Switches the check off everywhere.
To bring back a finding you stopped on one page, select Restore next to it. To bring back a check switched off for a segment, remove it under Settings > Checks > Switched off for a segment. To bring back a check switched off site-wide, select its checkbox again under Settings > Checks.
Browser console findings, such as a request blocked by your Content-Security-Policy, have their own This is fine button for each cause, so you can ignore one third-party script without ignoring every console error.
Related
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