Daily Checks on the Pages That Matter
A monitor can now run two schedules at once: a fast daily check of just the pages you have starred, and the usual full-site scan on a slower cadence.
Daily Checks on the Pages That Matter
Monitoring has always been a whole-site job: pick a schedule, and on that schedule the crawler re-audits the entire site and emails you what changed. That works, but it forces a compromise. Crawl the whole site every day and you are spending hours of crawl time — and a client URL budget — re-checking hundreds of pages that never change. Crawl weekly instead, and a broken checkout or an injected script on your busiest page can sit there for six days before anyone hears about it.
This release removes the compromise. A monitor can now run two schedules at once: a fast daily check of just the pages you have marked as important, and the usual full-site scan on a slower cadence.
How it works
On the results page you can star any page. It is the same star you may already use to make sure a page is always included when a large site rotates through its crawl budget — now it does double duty.
In the monitor settings there are two schedule fields:
- Full scan schedule — the whole site, as before. Weekly is a sensible default.
- Quick check schedule — just the starred pages plus the homepage. Daily, or even twice a day.
A typical setup: ten starred pages (checkout, cart, the top landing pages, the contact form), checked every morning; the full site scanned every Monday.
The quick check is genuinely quick. It crawls only the URLs you named, follows no links, and skips the whole-site analysis that does not apply to a handful of pages — so it is a job of seconds, not the tens of minutes a full crawl takes. If the daily and weekly schedules ever land on the same tick, the quick check stands aside and lets the full scan cover those pages.
Why two baselines matter
The subtle part is what each run gets compared against. A monitor change report is a diff against the previous crawl — but diffing a 10-page quick check against a 500-page full scan would report 490 pages as "removed", then 490 as "added" the next week. Noise, every single run.
So the two cadences keep separate baselines. A quick check is compared against the previous quick check; a full scan against the previous full scan. The daily email tells you what changed on your key pages since yesterday. The weekly email tells you what changed across the whole site since last week. Neither is polluted by the other.
What each email tells you
The alerts are labelled so you can tell them apart at a glance. A daily one leads with "Daily check —" and says up front that it covered only your starred pages plus the homepage — so a short diff reads as "your key pages are fine", not "the crawler only saw ten pages". The weekly one leads with "Full scan —" and covers everything.
Both carry the same detail as before: newly-broken pages and links, new issues (including suspicious inline scripts), pages that appeared or vanished, and anything that recovered since last time.
The point of it
Most of what goes wrong on a website goes wrong on a small number of pages — the ones that take payment, capture leads, or pull the most traffic. Those are the pages worth looking at every day. The rest of the site changes slowly and a weekly pass is plenty.
Until now you had to pick one cadence for the whole site. Now you point the frequent, cheap check at the pages where a problem costs you money, and let the thorough check sweep everything else on its own schedule. A skimmer on your checkout page, a 404 on your best-converting landing page, a form that broke in last night plugin update — you hear about it the next morning, not the next Monday.