It settles which pages to start monitoring from and how the first baseline is formed. A badly configured start comes back as pointless notifications weeks later.
Who is this for
- Agencies starting to monitor client sites
- Teams taking over a client who need the current state of the site on record
- Anyone evaluating the product during the trial
Prerequisites
- A Crawlens account (every new organization starts with a 14-day Pro trial, no card required)
- The addresses of the pages you want to monitor — they must be public
- The email address notifications should go to
Step-by-step
- Open a project for the client
Keep one project per client. Notifications, share links and reports all run through the project.
- Add the first URLs
Add them one at a time, or upload a CSV or hand over a sitemap.xml address to import in bulk. Addresses coming from a sitemap are previewed first and trimmed to your plan’s URL limit.
- Wait for the baseline
If the URL is active the first scan enters the queue immediately and the first successful snapshot becomes the baseline. Every later comparison is made against that baseline.
- Choose a scan frequency
manual, hourly, daily or weekly. Hourly suits campaign and pricing pages, daily suits corporate pages. The number of hourly URLs is limited by the plan.
- Review and close the first change
When a notification arrives, open the diff. Marking it “Reviewed” or “Ignored” advances the baseline to the current state, so the same change is not reported again.
Operational outputs
- A dated baseline snapshot for every URL
- An email notification when something changes
- The first piece of evidence you can show a client (before/after/diff image)
Plan availability
- Free: 1 client site, 3 evidence pages, 10 metadata pages per site, 7 days of history
- Pro ($49/month): 10 client sites, 5 evidence pages per site, hourly on 5 URLs, 90 days of history
- Agency ($149/month): 25 client sites, 5 evidence pages per site (50 in total), hourly on 3 URLs, 180 days of history
Limits and guardrails
- Only public pages can be monitored; there is no session support for pages behind a login
- Screenshots are taken with mobile Chrome at 412px wide; there is no desktop profile
- When you reach the plan’s URL limit no new URL can be added (402)
Expected outcome
- A baseline for every monitored page within the first day
- You hear about the first real change before the client does
- Every change leaves a dated visual record in the archive
Troubleshooting paths
- If no baseline formed, check that the URL is active and that the address opens in a browser
- If you get too many notifications, mark carousels and ad slots as ignored regions
- If the same change keeps being notified, you have not closed it as “Reviewed”