Platform and specification checks
Two tabs in Monitor look at a site as a whole rather than page by page. Platform checks the property itself: whether it is up, served over HTTPS with a valid certificate, redirected consistently, and readable by search engines through robots.txt and sitemaps. Specification measures your pages against the Website Specification, a published standard for well-built sites. Platform findings can alert you; Specification results never do.
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 Platform tab
The Platform tab shows what is Open right now on the property, then its current state:
| Section | Fields |
|---|---|
| Domain | Origin, HTTPS, Pages tracked |
| Certificate | Expires, Days left, Last checked |
| Uptime | Monitoring, Status, Last probe |
| robots.txt | Present, Rules, Crawl delay, Last read |
| XML sitemaps | Declared, URLs seeded |
| robots.txt, in full | The complete file as last read |
Uptime is probed every minute. Every other platform check runs every hour.
Platform checks
| Check | Severity | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| The site is not responding | Critical | The origin returned a 5xx or did not answer. A failure is confirmed by a second probe before it is reported. A 4xx is not treated as down |
| The site is not served over HTTPS | Critical | The site’s address is http, not https |
| The TLS certificate has expired | Critical | Visitors see a browser warning |
| The TLS certificate expires soon | Warning | The certificate expires within 14 days |
| The http address serves the site instead of redirecting to https | Critical | The http:// address answers with the site instead of redirecting |
| The other hostname serves the site instead of redirecting | Warning | For example, www. and the bare domain both serve the site |
| robots.txt blocks search engines from the entire site | Critical | robots.txt disallows everything |
| robots.txt blocks Workover from crawling this site | Warning | robots.txt blocks the WorkoverMonitor user agent |
| robots.txt changed | Warning | The file is different from the last time Monitor read it |
| robots.txt cannot be fetched | Warning | Monitor could not read the file |
| No sitemap is declared | Warning | No sitemap in robots.txt or at the usual locations |
| A declared sitemap cannot be fetched | Warning | A sitemap listed for the site could not be read |
| robots.txt does not point to a sitemap | Info | robots.txt has no Sitemap: line |
| A Sitemap line in robots.txt is not an absolute URL | Info | A Sitemap: line uses a relative path |
| robots.txt sets a crawl delay | Info | robots.txt includes a Crawl-delay rule |
Every new site starts with alert rules for The site is not responding, robots.txt blocks search engines from the entire site and The TLS certificate expires soon. See Alerts and incidents.
The Specification tab
The Specification tab shows how the site measures against the Website Specification. It gives a conformance percentage and a count of passing and failing checks, broken down by category:
- Foundations
- SEO
- Accessibility
- Security
- Well-known URIs
- Agent readiness
- Performance
- Privacy
- Resilience
- Internationalisation
Each item on a page passes, fails or does not apply. Items that do not apply to a page, for example a cookie rule on a page that sets no cookies, are excluded from the percentage.
Page-level items are evaluated from the HTML and response headers Monitor already fetched when it checked the page. Items that need a rendered browser (such as color contrast), DNS records or the HTTP version are not measured directly: most are left out, and a few are judged from a hint in the HTML or headers.
Specification results are recommendations, not incidents. Nothing on this tab opens an incident or sends an email. Each page’s detail screen also has a Specification section with that page’s results. See Pages and crawl activity.
How this differs from the health score
The health score, out of 1,000 for each page and for the site, is driven by Monitor’s own checks. See Issues and severity. The Specification percentage is a separate measure against an external standard, and does not affect health or alerts.
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