If you are like me and have many websites that you have to monitor, you'll understand just how much of a headache it can become to regularly check to make sure that nothing is going wrong with the sites and in a lot of cases the problems are hidden in the back end so you find out after your rankings have taken the hit. Luckily there's a tool out there that can take all that stress away from you.
Little Warden is a website monitoring tool that will regularly check for any kind of errors from a sites MX records to problems with the robots.txt. As you build a bigger network of sites a tool like this is vital or manually checking each of them could become a full-time job.
How Much Does it Cost?
So before I dive into how the tool works I'll go over the different pricing structures.
There are a few different options for you to choose from which makes this tool useful regardless of the number of websites you have to manage. At the lower end of the scale starting at £14.99 pm, you can monitor up to 20 URLs and the past data will be stored for 2 weeks. The most expensive package at £99.99 pm will let you monitor 5000 URLs and store the data for up to 6 months. All of the packages have a 30-day money back guarantee and there is also the option to pay annually which actually gets you 2 months free.
Adding URLs
Once you've signed up, you can get straight to monitoring your sites. It's important when adding a URL to include "http://" or "https://" if the site is SSL secured otherwise it can't monitor it accurately. Underneath where you input the URLs is the different checks you can make.
Depending on which payment plan you are on, there is a limit to the amount that Little Warden can monitor for you. Then at the very bottom, there is an "advanced tab" that lets you choose which server Little warden will use to scan your site. You are best selecting the location that your website is based in.
Little Warden can also be integrated with your Google search console. All you need to do is sign into your Google account that has search console set up and both will work together when issues are resolved etc. In this example, I have my own website in there along with a few popular websites.
After you add the sites you are shown an overview of the screenshot above. From here you can see that each of the checks is split into 3 categories
Danger - These are things you should be looking to fix asap. They could potently harm your site's performance and rankings if left for too long.
Warnings - You should definitely look into these issues and get them fixed when you can, however, they don't require immediate attention, unlike the danger category.
All Good - This means that its correct and no change is required. If we take a closer look at one of the URLs we will be able to see a breakdown of each of the checks.
So looking at the"game" website, we can clearly see what is all good and what needs attention. Clicking on the configure button on any of these checks will give you a little more information on what the issue is and how to resolve it.
The main issue with this site is the 404 status returns a 200 status code. Little Warden also gives you the option to ignore the issue if it turns out to be a false positive. This is pretty useful to help keep monitoring as accurate a possible.
Daily Patrol Report
This section updates on a daily basis, showing you any warnings or dangers that occur on your sites. If you have a massive list of URLs being monitored on Little Warden, using this area is very handy as it takes you straight to the errors without having to scroll through all of your sites.
Renewal Report
In here are your domain and SSL renewal report. Little Warden will tell you the dates on which they expire along with calculating the amount of the days it's going to be before you need to renew.
Change History
Once you've been using Little Warden for a while, you'll be able to see the history of changes on each site. So any errors that have been fixed or any metadata that has changed since the URLs been tracked Little Warden will keep track of it in here.
API
The API section allows you to integrate Little Warden with 3rd party applications. This is meant for more advanced users who might have some other piece of software that could use this tool's features.
Notifications
The last thing that is worth mentioning is the notification settings. Here you can choose what aspects of the tool you will be alerted on. For example, you can be alerted to your daily changes or you can choose just to receive the report on a monthly/weekly basis. It's entirely up to you how often you'd like to be updated but I would highly suggest keeping the expiry alerts notification to avoid any websites going down etc.
Overview
If you own multiple sites and you feel like the management side has become too time-consuming, I would highly suggest looking at Little Warden. Having a tool monitoring your site 24/7 means that you never have to worry about them until you are actually alerted with a problem instead of spending time looking for them yourself.
With flexible payment plans depending on the volume you are going to monitor as well you will be able to keep costs down and will allow you to monitor your websites from one easy dashboard. You can get Little Warden right here.