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Understanding alerts

Placeholder

This page is a stub — we'll flesh out each alert type with real examples and recommended fixes as the alert catalog stabilizes.

When Wygard detects a change on a monitored page, it sends an alert. Each alert includes:

  • What changed — e.g. meta robots went from index,follow → noindex,nofollow
  • Where — which page, which test
  • When — timestamp of the check
  • Severity — how likely this is to hurt rankings

Severity levels

Wygard uses two alert severities, plus a green "no alert" state for healthy tests:

Level Meaning Typical example
🔴 Danger Will almost certainly cost organic traffic if left unfixed. Email goes out immediately after the crawl batch finishes. Homepage meta robots flips to noindex.
🟠 Heads-up A change worth a human look, but not a five-alarm fire. Rolled into a daily summary email. Meta description rewritten across a category template.
🟢 Success The most recent crawl matched the baseline. No alert is sent — the test simply stays green. Canonical tag still points to the same URL it did yesterday.

Each test has a default severity baked in (see the per-test pages under Tests). You can change the severity per test in the test library — for example, downgrade a Heads-up to track silently, or upgrade a Heads-up to Danger on your most important URLs.

One test is always on

The Status code test runs on every monitored URL and cannot be disabled. If a URL returns 404 or 5xx, everything else Wygard checks on the page becomes moot, so this test always fires first.

Responding to an alert

  1. Open the alert from your email or dashboard.
  2. Check the diff — Wygard shows the previous value and the new value.
  3. Decide: intended change or accidental regression?
  4. Pick one of the actions on the alert card:
    • Set found value as desired — adopt the new value as the baseline (only offered when the test is "is exactly" and currently in error). Use this when the change was intended.
    • Mute for 1 week / 1 month — keep running the comparison but don't send notifications during the muted window.
    • Pause — set the test to inactive. Useful while you're mid-fix and don't want repeat alerts.
    • Delete — permanently remove the test (confirms first).

When the underlying source is fixed, the next crawl turns the test back to 🟢 Success automatically; you don't need to mark anything resolved.