Why You Should Use Website Change Detection Tools? 1

Whatever field you present, one important metric that makes you a professional in your field is to stay updated all the times. With every day usage of internet, there are opportunities and challenges.

Website change monitoring can help you so greatly in grabbing the best opportunities and coping with the everyday online challenges. Due to the fast paced and ever changing technology landscape, website change detection comes in to assist you as individual (say marketer) to stay on the top and current.

In this article, I am going to discuss these points:

What is Website Change Detection? (Click to Jump)

Some good scenarios to apply them? (Click to Jump)

Best website change detection tools to use to track changes on any website. (Click to Jump)

Let’s get started.

Website Change Detection?

Website change detection — or monitoring — or change detection and notification is a service intend to detect any change within pages and send notifications with details of changes that took place to the user. These systems prove to be so effective and efficient due to the fact that most web servers do not correctly and accurately track changes of content via HTTP Etags.

Website change detection has been widely used by professional folks as it is beneficial, user friendly and complexity free.

Scenarios To Use Website Change Detection?

Website change detection can be used in many cases as per your liking or tendency. The following as some examples:

• If you want to monitor and control your competition: I believe the best use of change detection is if you want to track, know and follow up with your competitor.
  Setting up change monitoring on your peer website will give you competitive advantage and make you well aware of your competition and competitors activities such as reductions, special offers, new products, releases…This can help you save a lot of time and money.

• The second main use of change detection could be tracking special offers that your lovable store offers with time limitation. We all know that many sellers and eCommerce websites are offering from time to time special offers for some items as a marketing package. It can be so difficult to come back to a certain website to check it many times.
  With change detection, you don’t have to lose time and energy by coming back to the online website store. Only you need to track your favorite store page(s). And voila, you will have notifications in-boxed to you with the special offers. Eehh, How much sweet is that?

• The third scenario to use website change detection could be monitoring a software development.  If you use a software and you like it, most probably you need to know more about it and stay updated regarding its development, version, fixing bugs, improvement and so on.

Because many times there is no way to get notified to a software development (like newsletters), you can consider website change detection the best candidate in this situation.

• The last scenario that you can take advantage from using change detection is tracking content change in your favorite blog. There are a lot of blogs and content in the internet out there. But –like newspapers– it seems everyone has some favorite blogs and bloggers. You can employ website change detection to work for you in such cases.

Best Website Change Detection Tools:

If you are looking for the best website change detection, you may find this part of this post useful. We already have done research, so you can save some time and energy.

• I-  changedetection.com:  This is my favorite one. I am using change detection in all websites that matter to me. For example, I placed it to track Google Tag Manager Version2 development (check screenshots above). ChangeDetection.com is Free, easy to use and powerful. It deserves a trial. Believe me, you ll enjoy a complete piece of mind.

• II- versionista.com: is yet another great website change detection tool to use. Versionista is able to send you notifications when something has been added or removed in a website. It offers a list of edit histories and more. You need to create an account to start using their services.

• III- visualping.io: This tool has Chrome App Extension too. You need to pay to use services of Visualping.

• IV- followthatpage.com: I have noticed that Follow That Page is quite trusted and most used tool in the Internet. There are some good reviews about the services of followthatpage.com. As its URL name suggests, it provides great servicess in websites changes. You can give it a try!

• V- Page Monitor Chrome Extension: This extension based change detection tool provides user-friendly services to how to monitor changes for any website out there.

• VI- Distill Web Monitor: This tool is Firefox extension. It offers simple as well as advanced options to give you more control in page monitoring. This is a very good but powerful website change detection tool for Mozilla users.

Summary:

There is nothing wrong with monitoring public website pages. I believe it is recommended and healthy tendency or habit to keep an open eyes on things around you. The above website change detection tools are for those who are in competitive markets and who wants to stay well informed.

Do you have any feedback about this post? Any other tools not mentioned above to share with us? Please comment below if you have something to say. In the meanwhile, please subscribe to receive newsletters  or you can monitor this page for any new posts!