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Getting started

Go from sign-in to your first monitored run—and know what to look for when it finishes.

On this page

1. Sign in with GitHub

  1. Click Sign in with GitHub in the header (or on Pricing if you are choosing a plan first).
  2. Authorize Signal Diff with your GitHub account. Your login is used only for authentication—runs and history are tied to your account, not a specific repo.
  3. Open the Dashboard. This is your home for monitored sites, run history, overview cards, and reports.

The dashboard is empty until you complete your first monitored run. A short welcome card explains what will appear there.

2. Run your first scan

A monitored run crawls your sitemap, runs SEO and crawl checks on every URL, saves the results to your history, and (on later runs) compares against a baseline.

  1. On the Dashboard, click Run scan now in the page header.
  2. Confirm or edit the sitemap URL shown above the overview (under Advanced options for concurrency, timeout, and agent settings).
  3. Wait while the job status shows Running. Typical sitemaps finish in a few minutes depending on size and response times.

Your first run establishes the starting point. The deploy diff card and trend comparisons become most useful from the second run onward, when there is a prior run to compare against.

3. After completion: overview and deploy diff

When the run reaches Complete, the welcome card is replaced by overview cards and run history. Open the latest run to see the full report.

Overview cards (dashboard)

  • Latest run — Status, error/warning/info counts, and a shortcut to View report.
  • Trend — How counts changed versus the previous run (once you have more than one complete run).
  • Active job — Shows when a crawl is still in progress for the selected site.

Below the cards, Top issues groups the highest-impact findings from the latest run. Use View all in report to drill into every check and URL.

Deploy diff card (run report)

On the run detail view, the deploy diff section compares this run to your baseline—the prior run Signal Diff selected for the same site. It highlights:

  • New findings — Regressions that appeared since the baseline.
  • Resolved findings — Issues that cleared since the baseline.
  • URLs changed — Pages whose checked fields differ between runs.

The headline and impact summary describe the overall severity. Use the compare dropdown in the report if you need a different baseline run. For a deeper explanation, see Baselines and diffs.

Large sites: counts vs per-page detail

Overview cards and run headers always show site-wide totals—how many pages were crawled and how many errors, warnings, and info findings were found across the full sitemap.

The findings list below may show detail for only a subset of pages when the crawl is large (default storage cap: 25 pages). Signal Diff keeps pages with errors and error-level findings first, then warnings, then info, then clean pages. If detail is partial, a yellow coverage banner appears at the top of the report.

To sample a huge sitemap, set Max pages in advanced crawl options. For why counts and listed pages can differ, see Troubleshooting — report page coverage.

4. Optional: set up a schedule

Manual scans and CI triggers are useful, but easy to forget. A schedule runs your sitemap on a recurring calendar so issues surface in history even when nobody clicks Run scan now.

  1. Open Schedules and click Add schedule.
  2. Choose the sitemap URL, recurrence (daily, weekly, or custom cron in UTC), and optional crawl limits.
  3. Completed scheduled runs appear on the dashboard like manual runs.

For UTC/cron semantics, cloud vs agent execution, and pausing schedules, see the Schedules guide.

5. When to upgrade

The free plan includes on-demand monitored runs, saved sites, schedules, and 30-day run history—enough to evaluate Signal Diff on production.

Upgrade to a paid plan when you need:

  • CI/CD integration — API keys and the x-ci-api-key header to trigger runs from pipelines or GitHub Actions. CI access is not available on the free tier.
  • Cross-environment compare — Diff staging, test, and production side by side with path-aligned matching. Same-site deploy diffs stay free; cross-host compare requires a paid plan. See Cross-environment compare.
  • Projects — Group Dev, Test, and Prod environments per product for one-click compare presets. See Projects.
  • Higher concurrency — Run up to 3 crawls at once (free tier: 1). Run history is still capped at 30 days on all plans—see Plans and limits.

Paid plans include a trial period where applicable. Your dashboard, schedules, and history continue on the free plan if you cancel.

Next steps