Website content check

Basic website check, described here, does a lot: it check network and server issues, spots server and website errors and report every common technical issue.

But what if the site is tehcnically fine, but is missing some important information that is supposed to be there? Such kind of issues are easy to miss: the site works fine, and webmaster's used to the site appearence eyes just look throught and might not notice some visibly small, but logically important issues. Like any specific title, announcement, ad, whatever. So the content check feature is introduces to manage presence of expected content.

Content check is an advanced option of the basic website check. It does exactly the same - every few minutes (accoring to your settings) tries to reach the website just as the regular site customer does. Additionally, it looks for the specific, predefied information.

There are just two importand fields - KEYWORDS (what to look for) and CONDITION.

Let's start from the latter. Condition defines the behaviour of monitoring. It triggers the reports, if the keywords are present or absent. And the keywords are the words, which must be present or absent on the page. Please note that you can make the monitoring to trigger the alert on a single keyword, or only if all of them appear/disappear at once.

Let's see some exapmles.

1. A website contains clocks which show time in New York, London and Tokyo. They are marked "time in New York", "time in London", "time in Tokyo". If one enters all these phrases into the keywords field (separated by comma) and selects "ALL keywords must be present", then the alert is sent if any of those clock disappear from the page. But if you select "Any keywords much be present", they the site will be treated as fine if just any of those clocks is there.

2. A website is working fine, but sometimes instead of some particular parts messages like "error", "failure", "file not found" issues appear. One can just enter all this keywords into the corresponding field and select "ALL keywords must be absent", and if any of them appears - the error is spotted, and alert is delivered.

NOTE! During the http check only limited amount of information is loaded. It is made so in order not to overload neither the monitored site, nor the checking servers. So if the site is heavy enough, it is recommended to consider the content from the top part of the website, as the page is always read from the top to the bottom.

This is pretty simple way to manage the content of a web page in the same way a human eye does. Of course, there are more sophisticated ways. The information which is displayed on the page is waved somewhere in files or databases, is generated by scripts and goes through a complicated processes before it is shown in a browser. So there are tools which could give a hand in tracking that information and find the causes of the problems on a deeper level. That might provide more information for a webmaster to solve the problem faster.

Namely, they are: page speed check and database check.

Database check analyzes the specified values in the database. It can evaluate the results of certain queries, number of records, volume and so on. And the pagespeed check runs the scripts and loads media files during every check. It can detect script errors and warnings, providing a comprehensive view of the moniotored website performance.

Choosing the proper type of monitoring or combining them can spot all the range of possible issues and greatly increase website performance.