Issues and severity

Monitor grades what it finds, so a report of two hundred items still tells you which three to do today.

The grades

Critical — the page is not working, or is actively excluded from search. A 5xx, a redirect loop, a noindex on a page that should be indexed, a canonical pointing somewhere else. Fix today.

High — the page works but something is wrong that will cost you. A missing or duplicated title, a broken canonical, structured data that fails validation, internal links to pages that 404.

Medium — worth fixing, not urgent. A missing meta description, a thin page, an image with no alt text, a heading structure that skips levels.

Low — informational. Conventions and nice-to-haves.

Reading the list

Sort by severity, then by whether it is new. A critical issue that has been there for a year is a backlog item; one that appeared since yesterday’s crawl is an incident, and it usually has a cause you can still remember.

That is the distinction worth internalising: Monitor’s value is less in the absolute list than in the delta.

Fixing

Each issue says what was found, on which page, and what it should be. Most are fixed at the source — in Workover if it is content, in your theme or plugin settings if it is structural.

If it is content, the page usually corresponds to a Workover document: fix it there and push, rather than editing in wp-admin and having the two drift.

Muting

Some findings are correct and not applicable. A tag archive with thin content is not a defect. Mute those so they stop occupying the list.

Mute deliberately and narrowly. A muted rule that later fires for a real reason is silent, so mute the specific page or pattern rather than the rule across the site.

Related

• Pages and crawl activity
• Changes and diffs
• Alerts and incidents