It makes visible what quietly breaks across the dozens of sites you manage but never open every day. This page helps you decide which pages are worth monitoring.
Who is this for
- Agencies running 10–100 client sites
- Teams whose clients also touch the site themselves
- Account managers who have to prove the work they did
Prerequisites
- A shortlist of pages worth monitoring (usually the home page, pricing/campaign, contact, and the 2–3 templates that get the most traffic)
- An idea of who deploys to the client’s site
Step-by-step
- robots.txt and indexing accidents
A client’s developer ships a staging setting to production, robots.txt becomes “Disallow: /” or a page picks up noindex. Crawlens tracks the robots.txt file and robots meta/X-Robots-Tag headers separately; that change counts as critical and is sent without waiting for the digest.
- Theme, plugin or third-party update
An automatic update that runs overnight breaks the layout. Visual comparison catches the broken area even when not a single line of HTML changed.
- Pricing and campaign pages
A wrong price, or a campaign box that was taken down. Monitor the pricing area hourly; when a change arrives you already have a dated screenshot.
- A page becoming unreachable
When the HTTP status changes (5xx, 404, redirect) that is reported as its own class; no pixel comparison is involved.
- Proving the work you did
When a client says “it always looked like that”, you send the before/after image through a share link that expires. The discussion ends.
Operational outputs
- Immediate email for critical changes
- A grouped digest for everything else
- An evidence link and a single PNG you can share with the client
Plan availability
- Change detection and the evidence archive are identical on every plan
- Plans only decide how many URLs, how often and how far back
- Hourly monitoring is not available on the Free plan
Limits and guardrails
- Crawlens does not fix the breakage; it reports and records it
- Pages behind a login, checkout flows and per-person content are out of scope
- It does not measure traffic, conversion or ranking — this is not an analytics product
Expected outcome
- You learn about a page that broke silently the same day, not weeks later
- The direction of the conversation with the client reverses: you are the one who tells them
- Every incident has a dated record
Troubleshooting paths
- If you cannot decide which pages to monitor, start with the 3 templates that get the most traffic
- If regions keep changing (carousels, ads), ignore them
- If Crawlens missed an accident, write to us — every miss feeds threshold calibration