Introduction

In the modern world of business, your website is at the core of people's understanding of your business. It tells people what you do, how you do it, who it is aimed at and how they can get in touch or become a customer.

When your website provides such a crucial impression, especially a first impression, you do not want that impression to be inaccurate or harmful.

Incorrect changes to the website, malicious activities and software or server errors can all harm the impression your website gives to visitors. Other website monitoring tools cannot spot these sorts of issues, but visual change monitoring can!

What is visual change monitoring?

When you first enrol your website in a visual change monitor it scans your website and takes a screenshot. Then, when the website is periodically monitored, it takes a new screenshot and compares the two. If there is around a 20% difference, and you can tweak this threshold, then it will send out an alert.

A change monitor needs to account for an image not loading as quickly as usual or a small shift in content as a page loads. But if the title of the page has disappeared completely or there has been a significant sudden change in the content it will let you know.

Now, you might ask what the point is, especially when you have uptime monitoring in place. Whilst uptime monitoring is great, all it does is ask a website if it loads with a 200 code, to say whether something is there, or not. It will only alert you if the 200 code does not come back.

The subtlety of visual change monitoring is about spotting things that just don't look right. The Home page has loaded, but this cafe's website now has an advert for a casino and one for adult content plastered across the top. Doesn't sound right, but the uptime monitor says it's fine. Spot the important difference?

When would you benefit from visual change monitoring?

As was mentioned in the last paragraph, it can be about spotting when someone has maliciously changed your website. It can also be about human errors and software issues.

I discovered visual change monitoring, like most facets of UpWatch, due to unwanted circumstances. A website I was managing had the nameservers maliciously changed. This meant the website reverted to the GoDaddy 'parked domain page'. See below.

The issue here is that the uptime monitoring I was relying upon did not notice the change. As the parked page loaded, the uptime monitoring said everything was okay with the website.

Having also managed WordPress websites, I have on a few occasions seen and caused the example below.

Due to an issue with an update, it can lead to a critical error with the website. You can also have issues with any CMS that relies upon a database for the connection between the website and its database to break.

Beyond the malicious consequences and the software issues, you can also have moments where someone makes a simple human mistake. Whilst updating the website forgetting to save at the end can lead to half-finished changes. Deleting an image from the website's media library that is used on the Home page can happen.

Whatever the reason, only a visual change monitor can spot these types of incidents, and save your blushes.

Why do businesses need visual change monitoring?

There are real consequences to visual change issues on websites. They can provide a bad impression to customers or worse. Let's look at the five main reasons why you should want to use visual change monitoring.

1. Brand consistency and trust - Sudden changes in colours, fonts and images can provide an inconsistent impression. You want your website to be correct and your brand trusted all of the time.

2. Security - Having your website hacked is a horrible experience. The consequences of it being plastered across your website with inappropriate and harmful content are so damaging.

3. Conversion protection - Find out key 'Get in touch' or 'Buy now' call-to-actions that have disappeared and can harm the very purpose of your website. If people can't get in touch or buy a product easily your sales will plummet.

4. Time - Spending time fixing errors is painful and costly. Spending time apologising for errors that were live for days before you realised is much worse.

5. SEO and performance - Big structural changes to your website can harm your SEO ranking and possibly affect loading times.

How can UpWatch help?

We provide seven website monitors for business. Collectively, they provide the most comprehensive website monitoring you can find.

We mentioned in our post about uptime monitoring that it is the most fundamental part of our offer. It spots when it has all gone wrong. However, as we have discussed, uptime monitoring on its own cannot give you the full picture or let you know when something outside of full downtime happens.

Our visual change monitoring, in conjunction with all of our other monitors, means you will never be in the dark when something happens with your website. You can rest assured that your website is working well and bringing new customers to your business.

Find your perfect monitoring package today.