Looking after the little technical details with LittleWarden

Richard Baxter

9th October 2017

One of the hardest problems most site owners face is keeping an eye on all the little details.

Is your DNS configured correctly, has there been a substantial change in your robots.txt file? Has your new agency managed your site’s “www” redirects correctly? And so on and so on.

Those little details don’t often have much to do with running a business on the front lines, so, they get missed.

And if they’re missed and something does go wrong it takes time and money to unpick the problem. Nasty.

Enter Little Warden

Littlewarden’s dashboard view

My friend Dom Hodgson is a busy bee indeed. Dom’s the omnipresent and multi-talented staple of the UK SEO Industry. Sometimes he’s dressed as a pro wrestler, sometimes he’s teaching code and co-founding companies but he’s always making a difference and helping out where he can. (Invoice is in the post Dom.)

Littlewarden is his project born from a quite alarmingly underserved niche. It’s easy to drop the ball on small things that have a massive negative impact on your SEO performance and in doing so, could cripple your business.

Setup is really easy, just add a site and select your monitoring options.

Custom scanning options. Simple but nothing else monitors this stuff!

There’s some cool stuff in the advanced options section, which I recommend you take a look at as domain and SSL expiry has caught more than a few people out in the past.

If Marketo had been using Littlewarden they’d have been fine.

When all is configured and ready to go, you get green lights for all of the things you’d setup to monitor. There’s a renewal report that monitors your SSL certificate and domain renewal specifically:

The scan is daily, I think it’d be nice to have an Enterprise mode where the scan for things like noindex and robots.txt changes switched to every few hours (for larger sites). Having said that, daily is more than enough for most websites.

Finally, you get a little daily email with all of your monitoring info enclosed. Here’s what that looks like:

So, I can’t actually believe that this wasn’t a thing before Dom came along with Littlewarden. I think it’s a great idea and could save literally millions in lost revenue for larger sites.

Think of it as technical SEO insurance.

Comments are closed.

  • Max

    We have been using a similar tool on our site the past year, Testomato.

    Although it can only check code on page, HTTP header & statues, so Little Warden has some different features, but maybe not as customisable as Testomato.

    But you are right, monitoring tools like these are really useful when you cant rely on just regression testing!

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