SignalWatch (opens in a new tab) 2 min read
How to watch your own website for unexpected edits
CMS mistakes and bad deploys change public copy without a green build. Monitor the few URLs that would hurt, and get a diff when the text moves.
You do not need to scrape your whole CMS. Pick the public URLs where a wrong sentence costs money or trust — pricing, homepage hero, signup terms — and watch them from the outside. When the text changes, you get a diff, whether the edit was intentional or not.
Why "we have Git" is not enough
- Marketing edits live in a CMS with five people who can publish.
- A plugin or theme update rewrites a block you forgot existed.
- A bad deploy ships staging copy to production.
- Git covers the repo. It does not cover the page the customer sees if content lives elsewhere.
An outside fetch of the live URL is the customer view. That is SignalWatch (opens in a new tab): scheduled check, visible-text comparison, unified diff by email, Slack, Discord, or HMAC-signed webhook. Free: 3 monitors every 15 minutes, no card. The same monitor alerts if that URL goes down or the certificate is inside 14 days.
Which pages to watch first
- Pricing (or the page that names your plans).
- Homepage hero and primary CTA — if the selector can isolate them.
- Signup, privacy, or terms if a wrong clause would be embarrassing.
Three free monitors are enough for most small sites. Add Pro ($12/month or $79/year) when the list grows. Competitor pricing uses the same habit with someone else's URL — how to monitor a competitor's pricing page.
Setup
- Open each URL in a private window. Confirm the copy is in the HTML.
- Create a monitor per URL. Use a CSS selector for the block that matters (
main, the pricing table, the hero section). - Ignore cookie banners, A/B test flicker, and clocks.
- Send the first alerts to yourself; move to Slack once noise is under control.
- Tell the team: intentional publishes may alert too. That is fine — unexpected silence is worse than an expected ping.
What this does not catch
- Broken links elsewhere on the site — Mortise (opens in a new tab) after a baseline.
- A full defect punch list — SiteCheck (opens in a new tab).
- Unauthorized server access. A text monitor is not an intrusion detector; it is a copy and availability canary on specific URLs.
Checklist
- Top three customer-facing URLs listed.
- Selectors tightened after the first noisy diff.
- Channel where someone will act.
- TLS expiry covered for free on those same monitors — details in how to monitor TLS certificate expiry.