Website change detection with a diff in every alert

You see exactly which lines changed on a page, in the alert itself, as soon as the next check finds them.

Edits that keep a 200 response

A freelancer edits the pricing page. A plugin update rewrites the footer. A deploy drops the cookie notice. On a hacked site, text that isn't yours starts appearing. Each of these returns a normal 200 response, so an uptime check sees a healthy page and reports nothing.

What OctoPing checks

On each content check OctoPing downloads the page and pulls out its readable text. Scripts, styles, markup and most page chrome are left out, and whitespace is normalized. It compares that text with the last good snapshot, so a change to a hashed asset filename or a cache-busting parameter doesn't count as a change. JSON and plain text responses are compared after spacing is normalized, so a reformatted file with the same content doesn't alert.

Content monitoring starts switched off, so you choose the pages where a change matters. Once it's on, the default is a check every 30 minutes, and you can pick every 5 minutes, every 15 minutes, every 30 minutes, every hour, every 6 hours or every day. A page that answers with an error is never compared, so an outage doesn't show up as a content change. The first snapshot sets the baseline.

Choosing pages that stay put

A site in OctoPing is one address, so example.com/pricing and example.com/terms are two sites. That lets you watch the exact page that matters instead of a home page full of moving parts. A page with a live clock, a news feed or a rotating banner changes on every check and will alert every time. Pick pages whose text should hold still, such as pricing, terms, contact details and landing pages.

What the alert says

The subject reads Change Detected with the page's address. The body is a line diff of the page text, with removed lines marked by a minus and added lines by a plus. Long diffs are shortened and end with a count of the changes left out. The email also carries an HTML version of the diff. The changed versions stay in the site's history in the app, so you can open an earlier snapshot later.

Website: https://example.com/contact
Status: Content changed

Changes:
--- Previous
+++ Current
@@ -1,3 +1,3 @@
 Contact us
-Support hours: Monday to Friday
+Support hours: Monday to Saturday
 Email support@example.com

View details in OctoPing: <link to the site>

Content alerts use the change-alert switch on each alert rule, which is on by default. They go to the email, Slack, Discord, webhook and browser push channels you've set up. If a client is a contact on a status page that shows the site, they get the content alert too.

Pair it with robots.txt monitoring, which watches the crawler rules.

How it fits the price

Every site gets website change detection along with uptime, SSL and the other checks, and no plan limits which checks a site can use. Plans start at $19 a month for 20 sites. See pricing for the full list.

Every account starts with a 14-day free trial. No card required. Start your 14-day trial, add a client's site, and the checks you turn on start with it.