Overview
Read the Site Health Monitoring Overview - the Health score, score history, availability, issues, the pages VitalSentinel checks, and the page and issue panels.
The Overview is the main page of Site Health Monitoring. From top to bottom, it shows:
- Banners, if something stops the checks.
- The Health score and the Score history.
- Availability: the times when VitalSentinel could not reach your site.
- Issues: the open problems, with the most important first.
- Pages: the pages that VitalSentinel checks.
A filter bar at the bottom of the screen narrows the Issues and Pages lists. See Filters.
Banners
A banner shows above the score when something stops or slows the checks:
| Banner | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Firewall is blocking our crawler on this site | A firewall, CDN or security plugin turns the crawler away. The checks stop. | Allow the crawler, then click Check again. See Crawler access. |
| Your site is not answering us | VitalSentinel cannot reach your site. The checks stop, and VitalSentinel tries again on a schedule. | Make sure that your site is online. |
| Your site asked us to slow down | Your server asked for fewer requests. The crawler now checks more slowly. | Nothing. The normal speed comes back automatically. |
| N pages couldn't be checked | A firewall blocked the crawler on some pages. VitalSentinel keeps their last results and does not report them as errors. | Allow the crawler on all pages. |
| Finish setup: your site serves visitors on phones from host | Your homepage sends phone visitors to a different host, for example m.example.com. VitalSentinel does not check that host yet. | Click Also check host. |
If the crawler is blocked or your site is unreachable for 30 days, the checks pause. VitalSentinel still tries your site once a day, and it does not delete data early.
Health score
The Health score is a grade from 0 to 100 for the technical health of your site:
| Score | Band |
|---|---|
| 90 to 100 | Good |
| 70 to 89 | Needs attention |
| Below 70 | Poor |
Under the score, one sentence explains the result. For example, "Nothing we checked in the last 7 days hurts search." The line under it shows the time of the last check. It also shows how many issues you snoozed or marked as normal, because these issues do not count.
The score is always for the whole site. The filter bar does not change it.
How the score works
Click the (?) button next to Health score to open How the Health score works. In summary:
- The score starts at 100. Each open issue removes points. A higher severity removes more points.
- An issue that affects more of your site removes more points. VitalSentinel measures this in pages or in Google clicks over the last 90 days, whichever is larger.
- The points come from five areas. Each area has a maximum number of points that it can remove, so one area cannot remove all the points:
| Area | What it covers | Maximum points removed |
|---|---|---|
| Reachability | Whether the checks can reach your pages, and whether the certificate is valid | 60 |
| Crawlability | robots.txt, sitemaps and broken links | 40 |
| Indexability | Whether Google has your pages, plus noindex, canonicals and content that appears only after JavaScript runs | 40 |
| Experience | Core Web Vitals, from real visitors where there is enough data, or else from Chrome's public data | 25 |
| Content & SEO | Titles, headings, other SEO elements, and AI crawler access | 30 |
Some problems are so serious that the score cannot go above a limit until you fix them:
| Problem | Maximum score |
|---|---|
| Your certificate has expired or is invalid | 40 |
| Robots.txt blocks Google | 20 |
| Most pages are noindex | 30 |
What does not count:
- A traffic drop by itself.
- Outages. Uptime Monitoring reports them.
- Issues that you snooze or mark as normal.
- Sources that you did not connect. They show as Not measured and remove no points.
Getting points back: when you fix a crawl problem, the points come back after the next check. To check immediately, click I've fixed it – check again on the issue. Page speed and indexing change with their 28-day data.
Page speed uses real-visitor data (RUM) when there are at least 300 page loads per device in 28 days. Otherwise, it uses Chrome's public data (CrUX) for the same 28 days. Pages missing from Google count only if they are in your sitemap, and the first 10% of them remove no points.
Score history
The Score history chart shows one bar for each of the last 30 days. The color of each bar shows the band. Hover over a day to see the score and the changes that moved it. For example, a new issue, a fixed issue or an issue that got worse.
The history keeps one score a day. If your site has a score for fewer than two days, the chart shows when the history starts.
Availability
The Availability card shows the times when VitalSentinel could not reach your site in the last 30 days. Each row shows when the problem Started, How long it lasted and What we saw. A problem that continues has the chip Ongoing.
Issues
An issue is one problem on your site. If the same problem affects many pages, VitalSentinel opens one issue for all of them. For the full list of problems, see Issue Types.
The Issues card lists the open issues, with the biggest impact first. Issues that give back the most points have the chip Fix first. Start with these issues.
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Issue | The name of the problem, and the module whose data found it |
| Severity | Critical, High, Medium or Low |
| Pages | Whole site, a number of pages, or the address of one page |
| Since | The date when the issue opened |
| Google clicks (last 90 days) | The Google clicks of the affected pages. Needs Google Search Console |
Whole site means that the problem is on the site level, or on 90% or more of the checked pages.
Click a row to open the issue details. The list shows 25 issues on each page.
Issue chips
| Chip | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Fix first | Fixing this issue gives back the most points. |
| Regressed | VitalSentinel closed this issue, but the problem came back. |
| Getting fixed – X of Y | X of the Y affected pages pass again. The issue closes when they all pass. |
| Already there when we started | VitalSentinel found this problem in its first checks of your site. It is not a new problem. |
| Unstable | This page changes on almost every check, so VitalSentinel ignores small changes on it. |
Issue status
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Open | The problem is on your site now. |
| Seen | A person on your team saw the issue. It stays open until the problem is fixed. |
| Snoozed | The issue is hidden for a time. It comes back if the problem is still there when the snooze ends. |
| Normal | You told VitalSentinel that this is normal. VitalSentinel does not raise it again. |
| Resolved | The problem is fixed. |
| Merged | VitalSentinel added this issue to a different issue about the same problem. |
| Expired | VitalSentinel stopped checking for this problem. For example, the page is no longer in the page selection. |
By default, the list shows Open and Seen issues. Use the Issue status filter to see the other issues.
Issue actions
Workspace owners and admins can act on an issue. Open the issue, then click More:
- Mark as seen: tell your team that you saw the issue. It stays on the list until it is fixed.
- Snooze…: hide the issue for 7, 30 or 90 days. It comes back if the problem is still there.
- This is normal…: stop VitalSentinel from raising the issue. Use this when the problem is on purpose. Select where it is normal: only on this page, only on some pages, or On every page, now and later. The last option adds a rule to Exceptions, where you can remove it.
To undo one of these actions, click Reopen.
An expired or invalid SSL certificate issue cannot be snoozed or marked as normal.
Check a fix
After you fix a problem, click I've fixed it – check again in the issue panel. VitalSentinel checks up to 10 affected pages in the next few minutes. The panel then shows the result, for example "8 of 10 pages now pass". You can use this once every 30 minutes for each issue.
Pages
The Pages card lists the pages that VitalSentinel checks. Select With a problem to see only the pages with a problem, with the worst first. Select All pages to see all of them.
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Page | The page address. Blocked by robots.txt or Unstable shows here when it applies |
| Problem | The worst problem on the page, its severity, the date it started and the number of problems. No problems when the page is fine |
| Google clicks (last 90 days) | Needs Google Search Console |
| Googlebot visit | The last verified Googlebot visit. Needs Server Log Monitoring |
| Indexed | Whether Google has the page in its index. Needs Indexing Monitoring data |
| Last checked | When VitalSentinel last checked the page |
If a firewall turned the crawler away on the last check, the Problem column shows Blocked by firewall. The page itself can be fine.
Owners and admins can use the buttons on each row:
- Check this page every day: pin the page. Pinned pages are always in the selection. See Pinned pages.
- Watch in Page Monitoring: add the page to Page Monitoring to get an alert when it changes.
Why VitalSentinel checks a page
Each page has a reason. The page details show it:
| Reason | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Your homepage | The homepage is always checked. |
| You pinned it | You pinned the page. |
| One of your top pages in Search Console | The page gets many clicks from Google. |
| One of your 50 most-clicked pages in Search Console | The page is one of your 50 pages with the most Google clicks. |
| It has an open issue | The page stays in the selection while its issue is open. |
| In your sitemap | Your sitemap lists the page. |
| Always checked | A page rule makes VitalSentinel always check it. |
| Keeps every part of your site represented | The page represents a section of your site. |
| Picked to cover your important sections | The page is in an important section. |
| High traffic or search importance | The page gets much traffic or is important in search. |
| Picked at random to cover the whole site | A random selection helps to cover the whole site. |
| Kept from the previous list of pages | The page was in the previous selection. |
| New in the latest refresh | The page was added when the selection was last updated. |
| Chosen for another reason | A different reason applies. |
VitalSentinel updates the selection every day and keeps most of the pages from the previous selection.
Page details
Click a page in the Pages card to open its panel. The header shows the page address, its status, the time of the last check and the reason for the check. It also has buttons to watch the page, pin it and open it.
The panel has four tabs:
| Tab | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Overview | A verdict for the page, Issues on this page, What changed, and crawling, indexing and Google search data |
| SEO | The title, indexing, canonical, word count and other search tags |
| AI & crawlers | Whether AI crawlers can read the page without JavaScript, robots.txt verdicts for each crawler, and AI and snippet directives. See AI readability |
| Technical | Response, Technical details, Response headers, Redirects, Console errors, Resources and Other values |
Page verdicts
| Verdict | Meaning |
|---|---|
| No problems found | Nothing on this page needs a fix now. |
| Worth a look | The page has open issues, but none of them is critical or high. |
| Needs fixing | The page has a critical or high issue. |
| The page does not load | Visitors and Google got an error instead of the page on the last check. |
| We could not read this page | A firewall turned the crawler away on the last check. The data can be old. |
| Not checked yet | VitalSentinel did not check the page yet. |
Compare checks
What changed lists the checks in which something on the page changed. Click a check to open Compare checks and see the two versions side by side:
- Fields compares values such as the title, canonical and status code.
- Text compares the visible text.
- HTML source compares the HTML line by line.
For each mode, select Before JavaScript (the HTML that your server sent) or After JavaScript (the page after scripts ran). For old checks, VitalSentinel keeps only the fields, not the full source.
Issue details
Click an issue to open its panel. The header shows the name of the issue, the I've fixed it – check again button and the More menu.
The Overview tab shows:
- A summary sentence and the pages that the problem affects.
- Tiles with the impact, for example Google clicks, Pageviews, Affected pages, Fixed and Open since. Some tiles need a connected source.
- Why it matters and How to fix, with numbered steps.
- What we found: the evidence, for example the canonical on your page and the canonical that Google chose.
- Possibly related: events that happened at about the same time, such as a robots.txt change, a sitemap change or an outage.
- A search impact chart with clicks and impressions before and since the issue started.
- History: events such as "Raised from High to Critical".
The Pages tab lists the Affected pages. Each page has a Status: Still there, Fixed or Not rechecked yet.
Filters
The filter bar at the bottom of the screen narrows both the Issues and the Pages lists. It shows only the filters that apply to your site. A filter that needs a source that you did not connect does not show.
| Filter | Options |
|---|---|
| Severity | Critical, High, Medium, Low |
| Problem | The problem groups, for example Indexability or Rendering |
| Page address | Part of an address, for example /products/ |
| Status class and Status code | The HTTP status of the page |
| In Google's index | Indexed, Not indexed, Not inspected |
| Google clicks (last 90 days) | A range of clicks |
| In sitemap | Yes, No |
| Last Googlebot visit | Within or not within the last N days |
| First seen | This week, In the last 30 days, Before we started checking |
| Issue status | The issue status |
When you filter by page, the list does not show site-wide issues.
Related
Site Health Monitoring
Site Health Monitoring checks your pages all day, gives your site a Health score from 0 to 100, and tells you when a problem affects a whole type of page.
Issue Types
Every problem that Site Health Monitoring can find, grouped as in the Problem filter, with its typical severity and what it means for your site.
