Adding a Site (Tips & Tricks)

Account Owners can add new sites to Siteimprove directly in the Siteimprove Intelligence Platform. 

Note: If you are not an Account Owner, please contact your organization's Account Owner and ask them to add the site or change your user rights. Feel free to contact Siteimprove support if you wish to add a site for one module only, e.g. a site has QA but not Analytics. We’re happy to help add the site for you.

Adding a site

To add a site go to Setting > Sites the navigation menu and then click on the Add Site button.

For more details see How do I add a site to my Siteimprove subscription?

Things to consider when adding a site

Setting up a site is normally straightforward but can be tricky when it comes to the details. Here are a few things to consider when adding a new site to your Siteimprove subscription.

Check that your Index-URL (the URL where the crawler starts) actually works.

If the Index returns an error page in a normal browser then use a different Index URL.

If the Index URL redirects to a different URL then use that URL as a starting point instead. Remember to consider the points below on sub-domains, domains, and folders when configuring a new site. 

It's a good idea to test the URL that you plan to add using an HTTP status code checker, (e.g. https://httpstatus.io).

Make sure you configure your site so the required pages are being checked.

Sub-domains
If you set up the site crawl to start at a sub-domain, then Siteimprove will only crawl that sub-domain.

i.e. If you set up a crawl on 

https://www.example.com

then by default, Siteimprove will NOT crawl 

https://subsite.example.com

or 

https://example.com

In order for these domains to be crawled you either need to set up a second site with a different Index URL. See our Site Content Settings article to learn how to set up "subsite.example.com" or "example.com" so pages are seen as being part of the same original site.

Domains
If you set up the site crawl starting on the domain level, then Siteimprove will crawl the domain and any subdomains linked to by default.

i.e. If you add an index URL of 

https://example.com

 or an internal settings of example.com then subdomains such as subsite1.example.com, subsite2.example.com, etc., will be crawled automatically.

Folders
A crawl starting at 

www.example.com/at/de/business.html

will crawl everything that is in the folder 

www.example.com/at/de/

and its subfolders, so in this case, the crawler would NOT crawl 

www.example.com/at/us/

The last forward-slash "/" of the index URL is important in terms of what content is crawled.

For example, using an index URL of 

www.example.com/at/uk

(without a forward-slash at the end) will crawl everything that is in 

www.example.com/at/

and its sub-folders, i.e. 

www.example.com/at/de/ 
www.example.com/at/us/
www.example.com/at/uk

etc.

If the website requires a login then credentials will need to be provided to Siteimprove. 

For further information on this see "Siteimprove Content Suite on Intranets/Login Sites".

Make sure that you are not including pages you do not want to be crawled.
Once you have set up your new site and it has crawled, you might notice that Siteimprove indexes pages that you do not want to check. You can find out which pages are being checked in the following ways:

• Look at Quality Assurance -> Inventory -> Pages
• Check out the overview at Quality Assurance -> Inventory -> Sitemap
• Use the search in the upper right corner of the Quality Assurance Overview page

If you find pages or sub-directories that you do not want to check, you can use Site Content Settings.

Site Content should be used if you do not want to check links anymore (for errors), and proper settings should be used if you do not want to index the pages anymore. Learn more about how Site Content Settings work.

Configure user access for the site.

Site access is not automatically granted to other users when a new site is added. For information on setting up user access, see the interactive tutorial – “How to edit user settings”.

Please contact Siteimprove Technical support if you have any further questions about configuring a website on your account.