Prioritize the technical issues to tackle first with Conductor Website Monitoring

The number of technical issues on your website can be overwhelming at times. Where do you start when Conductor Website Monitoring says you have over 40,000 issues to fix? And how can you know the issues you choose to fix first will have the most immediate impact?

There are various ways you can prioritize and resolve your most pressing issues—even before Google catches them.

Conductor Website Monitoring can help you prioritize what to focus on by setting certain rules. Identifying the most important pages to focus on, ignoring less significant issues, configuring how you want an issue defined, and adjusting which alerts are brought to your attention can help you organize which problems to tackle first.

The following instructions highlight these three ways to prioritize the at-times daunting list of issues present on your website. 

1. Refine the scope. One primary way you can start to prioritize all your issues is by identifying high-value pages you want to fix first. You can do this easily by creating page segments in Conductor Website Monitoring for those pages. Once created, you can quickly filter the Issues report to focus on those specific areas of your site you know are most important and relevant.
   
   Not sure which sets of pages on your site might be most affected by technical issues? Refer to this article to learn more.
2. Ignore irrelevant issues. Once you have chosen a set of priority pages selected in the Issues report, you can start to prioritize the issues on those pages. You can start by telling Conductor Website Monitoring to ignore certain types of issues.
   1. In the Issues report, review the categories of types of issues the appear in the column on left.
   2. For each of the categories of issues:
      1. Click the category in the report. A breakdown of individual issues within that category appears with details like the number of pages affected by the issue.
      2. For each type of issue you want to ignore, hover over where it appears and click the Ignore this issue button.
         
      3. In the window that appears, choose which segment for which you to ignore the issue (or choose your whole website if you prefer) and click Apply Changes. Conductor Website Monitoring will stop listing this as an issue for your site.
         
         Once you’ve ignored issues that are not relevant to your technical initiatives, Conductor Website Monitoring will no longer evaluate the issues.
3. Configure your issues. You can take the remaining issues for your segment of focus and adjust the parameters to best fit your site.
   1. Still in the Issues report, hover over a type of issue and click the Configure icon (the grey gear).
      
   2. In the window that appears, consider updating the settings to reflect the criteria you want Conductor Website Monitoring to examine. The specific settings you can configure depends on the type of issue. If the settings are appropriate for your site, you can leave them with the default settings.
      
   3. Click Save.
   4. Repeat this process for each issue type. Note that some issue types don't have settings you can configure.

Note that:

• Changes you make to configuration settings apply across your entire website.
• Some parameters like Length Units, Minimum Length, and Maximum Length are relevant to content-related issues like Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Content Headings, and more. However, these same parameters are not related to Issue types like Links, Images, and Canonical Links. Refer to this article to learn more about these settings.

What's next?

At this point, you should have a much more manageable set of relevant issues, and they are fine-tuned to your organization's desired best practices. You can start triaging and fixing these issues to protect your site's technical health.