What Monitor does
Monitor watches the pages you have already published and tells you when one stops being what you intended: a page that starts returning a 404, a noindex left on after a deploy, a canonical pointing at a page search engines are told to skip. It works on any public website, not only WordPress.
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 to have it turned on.
How Monitor works
Monitor does not crawl your whole site on a fixed schedule. When you add a site, it reads the site’s robots.txt and sitemaps to find pages. After that, it re-checks each page on its own interval, from every 15 minutes to every 24 hours. More important pages are checked more often.
Each check of a page is compared with that page’s previous check, so Monitor can show you what changed and when. The first check of a page is its baseline and records no changes.
Alongside your pages, Monitor watches:
- The site itself. Monitor probes your site every minute and reports “The site is not responding” as a Critical finding when it stops answering.
- Platform files and settings. robots.txt, declared XML sitemaps, the TLS certificate and your domain’s redirects are re-checked every hour.
- What a browser sees. When Render pages with a browser is on (the default), Monitor also loads each page in a browser. It can then report content that only appears after JavaScript runs, and errors in the browser console.
Every page gets a health score out of 1,000 and an importance score from 0 to 10. Importance decides how often a page is checked, and you can use it to decide which problems are worth an email.
What it catches
Some examples, with the severity Monitor gives each by default:
| Problem | Check | Severity |
|---|---|---|
| A page returns a 404, for example after a slug change | Page not found | Critical |
| A page now redirects somewhere else | Page redirects | Warning |
A noindex left on a page that should be indexed | Not indexable | Critical |
| A canonical pointing at a page excluded from search | Canonical points at an excluded page | Critical |
| Internal links pointing at a broken page | Links to a broken page | Critical |
| Important content that only exists after JavaScript runs | Only visible after JavaScript | Critical (needs browser rendering) |
| A title or meta description that someone rewrote | Title changed, Meta description changed | Info: recorded, not emailed by default |
Findings come in three severities: Critical, Warning and Info. See Issues and severity for what each means and how to change them.
When you start hearing from it
Page problems are not emailed until Monitor has checked every page of your site once. Anything found on your pages during that first pass is treated as the site’s existing condition, not as something that just went wrong, and you can read it on the Issues tab. Whole-site problems, such as the site not responding or robots.txt blocking search engines, are the exception: if one is still open when the first pass finishes, it is emailed then.
After the first pass, a problem that affects many pages is bundled into one incident, so it produces one alert rather than one email per page. See Alerts and incidents.
Where to find things
Each site in Monitor has these tabs:
| Tab | What it shows | Read more |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | Health score, pages tracked, open incidents, recent changes, and Check now | How to add a site to Monitor |
| Issues | Every check, grouped by category, with how many pages fail it | Issues and severity |
| Alerts | Incidents: what started happening, and whether you were told | Alerts and incidents |
| Specification | How the site measures against the Website Specification | Platform and specification checks |
| Pages | Every tracked page, with filters, segments and page detail | Pages and crawl activity |
| Changes | Which watched attribute changed on which page, and when | Changes and diffs |
| Platform | Uptime, certificate, domain, robots.txt and sitemaps | Platform and specification checks |
| Crawl activity | Search engine bot visits, from access logs you paste in | Pages and crawl activity |
| Settings | Checks, thresholds, alerts, reporting, and crawling | Monitor site settings |
What Monitor does not do
Monitor sees what a signed-out visitor and a search crawler see. It does not sign in and does not solve bot challenges, so pages behind a login are not supported. If your firewall challenges unknown bots, allow the WorkoverMonitor user agent.
How it is priced
Monitor is priced separately from your Workover plan, per page watched, and is arranged with us rather than bought self-serve. See Plans and pricing.
Start here
How to add a site to Monitor takes you from an empty Monitor screen to a site under watch.
Still need help?
Can’t find what you’re looking for? Our team is here to help.