Choosing Your Canary Pages

What a Canary Page Is, and Where to Set Yours

A canary page is a page you nominate for the daily check. The name is the bird kept in a coal mine: its job is to notice early. We look at each nominated page once a day, at the same time, and write to you only when something has broken.

The list lives in two places in your dashboard, and both edit the same list: on Settings, at the section headed Canary Pages, which is the first thing on that screen; and on Alerts, at the panel of the same name below the alert log.

Either way you get a list rather than a page of empty boxes. The first row is your homepage, marked Always checked, with no Removebeside it. Then a row for each page you have added, each with its own Remove. Then a quiet line saying how much room is left. Under the list is a box for the next address and an Add page button; there is no separate save.

Your Homepage Is Already Covered

The daily check runs whether or not you fill this in. With nothing saved it covers your homepage, which is the page most likely to be noticed and the page most people would nominate first anyway.

You can add up to 25 more, under Settings → Canary Pages in your dashboard.

Which Pages Are Worth Adding

The check is looking for damage, not for opportunities. So the pages worth nominating are the ones where damage costs you money and where you would not notice for weeks on your own.

• The page that takes bookings or enquiries. If a contact or booking page stops loading, everything upstream of it is wasted.
• Your biggest money pages. These are the services you would most hate to lose enquiries for.
• A page you have just changed. A redesign or a routine update is exactly when a page quietly starts telling search engines to skip it.
• Your blog index and pages you rarely link to, last. There is usually room for them once the pages that earn are covered — a fault on a page nobody visits is the one that costs you least.

What Gets Checked on Each Page

The check runs once a day, at the same time. These are asked of every page you nominate:

Page responds

The page still loads when we ask for it, rather than erroring or timing out.

Still indexable

Nothing on the page has started telling search engines to leave it out of their results.

Allowed in robots.txt

Your site publishes a small instructions file for search engines, called robots.txt, and it still lets them fetch this page.

Canonical unchanged

The page still names the same preferred address — the one it tells search engines to treat as the real one when the same content sits at more than one web address.

Title unchanged

The headline people read in search results is still the one you wrote.

And these are asked once about the site as a whole:

Crawlers allowed

The automated readers search engines and AI tools send out can still get in.

Certificate valid

The security certificate behind the padlock in the address bar is still valid, so no browser warns visitors away from you.

Sitemap reachable

The list of your pages that you publish for search engines, called a sitemap, still loads.

Every one of those is something that can change without anybody meaning to change it — a routine update, a change made elsewhere on the site, a security certificate nobody renewed. None of them announces itself, and all of them cost you customers while they last.

When We Email You About a Canary Page

You get an email when something breaks: what changed, what it costs you, and the likeliest cause. When nothing has broken, nothing is sent. Silence is the healthy state and not a sign the check has stopped.

If you would rather see the checks whether or not they found anything, the Alerts screen shows the full board — every page against every check, with the time of the last run — and you can turn on a weekly summary under Settings → Email Preferences.

Getting the Addresses Right

Paste the full web address of each page, the same one you would give a customer. Pages have to be on the site the subscription covers; a page on a different domain is a different website, and covering it is a second subscription rather than one of these slots.