# 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](/docs/pages-and-crawl-activity)
- [Changes and diffs](/docs/changes-and-diffs)
- [Alerts and incidents](/docs/alerts-and-incidents)