How to Get Notified When a Website Changes

Step by step

1. Copy the URL of the page you want to watch

   Open the page in your browser and copy the address from the address bar. Use the most specific page you can — a product page rather than the shop's homepage, the policy itself rather than the legal index.

2. Create a free Site Monitor account

   Sign up with your email address. The Free plan covers 10 URLs with hourly checks and needs no credit card.

3. Add the page as a site

   Click Add site and paste the URL. Give it a display name you'll recognise in an email subject line, such as "Venue tour dates".

4. Tick "Notify me when page content changes"

   This turns on change detection. Leave the CSS selector blank to watch the page's main text, or enter one to watch a single part of the page (see the next section).

5. Choose how often to check

   Set "Check every" to how quickly you need to know. The Free plan checks hourly; paid plans go down to every 5 minutes.

6. Save, and wait for the first change

   The first check records how the page looks now. From then on, when the content changes, you get an email naming the page, with a button that opens its dashboard — where an AI summary explains what changed.

You choose which alerts each URL sends — downtime, content changes, slow responses — and we email you when they happen.

What you'll need

• The URL of a public page (no login required)
• An email address for alerts
• Optional: a CSS selector to watch just one part of the page
• About a minute

Why not just bookmark it and check by hand?

Manual checking works for one page you visit daily anyway. It breaks down as soon as you care about several pages, or about changes that matter only if you catch them quickly — a presale opening, a restock, a new regulation, a competitor's price change. Those are exactly the changes you're most likely to miss.

Pages also change in ways that are hard to spot by eye. A single reworded sentence in a long terms-of-service page, a date added to the bottom of a list, or a number that moved from 49 to 59 are easy to scroll past. An automated check compares the content itself, so small changes are caught as reliably as big ones.

Stop false alarms by watching only the part you care about

Many pages contain parts that change constantly: ads, "last updated" timestamps, view counters, rotating banners, or recommendations. If you watch the whole page, those can trigger alerts that don't matter to you.

The fix is a CSS selector. Right-click the part of the page you care about, choose Inspect, and look for an id (shown as #something) or a class (shown as .something) on the surrounding element. Enter it in the CSS selector box — for example #price or .event-list — and Site Monitor compares only that element. You can list several, separated by commas.

If you don't set a selector, Site Monitor uses smart extraction of the page's title and main text, which already ignores most layout and whitespace-only changes.

What the alert looks like

When the page changes you get an email that tells you which page changed and when, with a View site button. That takes you to the site's dashboard, where an AI summary — when one is generated — describes in plain English what was added, removed, or reworded.

The Free plan includes 2 AI summaries a month; paid plans include more. Small changes may not get a summary, but you still get the alert.

Pages that load their content with JavaScript

Some pages are mostly empty HTML that fills in with JavaScript after loading — common for ticketing sites, shops, and dashboards. Site Monitor can render the page in a headless browser before comparing it, so that content is included.

If an alert never fires on a page you know has changed, check that the content is visible without logging in, and try a CSS selector that targets the element that changes.

Ideas for pages worth watching

Event and ticketing pages: an artist's tour page, a venue's calendar, or a festival line-up, so you hear about new dates and presales before they sell out. Government and regulator pages: guidance, consultation lists, and notices that affect your work. Vendor pages: terms of service, privacy policies, and pricing for the tools your business relies on.

Documentation and changelogs for APIs and libraries you build on. Job boards and careers pages at companies you'd like to work for. Grant and tender listings. Competitors' pricing and feature pages. Product pages you're waiting to drop in price or come back in stock.

As a rule of thumb, a page is worth monitoring if you'd want to know within an hour when it changes, and you'd otherwise have to remember to go and look.

Choosing a check interval

Check as often as the cost of missing a change demands, not more. Hourly checks (the Free plan's interval) suit most pages: policies, documentation, job listings, and government guidance rarely change more than once a day. Paid plans go down to every 5 minutes, which is worth it for fast-moving pages such as presales, restocks, or your own site's checkout.

You can set the interval separately for every URL, so a fast-moving page can be checked frequently while everything else stays hourly.

Frequently asked questions

Related

• Features: Change detection
• Guides: Monitor part of a web page
• Features: AI summaries
• Use cases: Live music & shows