How can changing my website URL affect my Siteimprove data?

The purpose of this article is to outline how changing your website and/or site URL can affect your account setup and the data shown in the Siteimprove Intelligence Platform (SIP).

Things to consider when looking into changing your website URL

There are some things you should consider before changing your website URL.

Most features in the platform will continue to work as usual. However, areas in the platform where a URL match has been made should be reviewed and edited where necessary.

If you are changing the URL to an entirely different URL (for example, changing from https://www.yoursitename.com to https://yourdifferentsitename.com and not just changing www or http to https), you should consider adding a new site instead of changing the URL. If you choose to go that route, you may need to re-setup things in areas of the platform like Group Matches, Policy matches, CMS Deep linking, included and excluded URLs, etc., but you would likely have to update those anyhow when updating your URL. If you add the new URL as a new site, if you don't delete the existing site, you always have the option to update the Site URL if adding the URL as a new site causes issues. 

Below, you will find a summary of aspects that need to be reviewed when changing your URL.

What implications does the URL change have on the Siteimprove Content Suite?

Change to the new site URL

If your website crawl fails due to the error “Final URL not internal” you will see an option to update your site URL to a new URL of your choice. The error means that your existing site URL redirects to a URL that is not considered internal based on your existing site URL.

 Example: 

• Your site URL is https://siteimprove.com/.  
• It redirects to https://www.siteimprove.com/.  
• Based on the current site URL https://siteimprove.com/ the site considers every page to be internal that matches //siteimprove.com/. https://www.siteimprove.com/ does not match //siteimprove.com/. 
• No pages are crawled because none of them are internal.

You can remedy this by updating your site URL. The flow to change your site URL provides the end URL of the redirect as a recommendation, though we suggest you check that this recommended URL is not already part of or a duplicate of an existing site on your account. If there is already another site crawling the same content, you might rather want to delete one of the sites. 

If you need a site URL to be changed without the error occurring on your site, please contact Siteimprove technical support, and we’ll be happy to change the URL for you, given that you are an Account owner. 

Group and Policy matches

Normally, the Content Suite will behave as it did before the URL change. However, we suggest that you check Group and Policy matches that contain URLs and edit them if necessary.

When creating a Group, you might choose a Group/Policy match that contains the URL, such as, 

http://www.examplesite.com/mygroup/ 

If so, this URL match will need to be updated, e.g 

http://www.newexamplesite.com/mygroup/

However, if you have only made a match containing the group name, e.g. /mygroup/, and the site URL has been indexed correctly to include the new version of the site, you will not have to edit the group.

If your website structure has changed completely you will need to recreate group and policy matches accordingly.

CMS Deep linking

CMS Deep linking is linking directly into your Content Management System’s editing environment. It saves time during the process of finding and fixing, errors on your website.

If your website changes then the CMS editing URL may also require an update. We recommend you test the CMS Deep linking feature from a page report. If it's not working as expected then refer to the information outlined in this "Enabling CMS Deep linking" article in order to have the CMS editing URL updated.

Site Content Settings - Included and Excluded Content, or Removed links

Excluded Content, Removed Content, and Removed Link settings under "Site Content Settings" (Settings > Crawler Management > Site Content Settings) are used to configure the Siteimprove crawler to determine which links/pages should be either excluded, considered an internal page, or considered an external page. URL matches are used when configuring this, so we recommend that you check these settings after a redesign or Domain name change. For further information on this, see "Site Content Settings."

What implications does the URL change have on Analytics? 

You'll need to make sure that you add the Analytics code to your new website design.

If the URL or domain changes, then you should contact Siteimprove support and let them know the new domain name so it can be added to your analytics account.

If you have access to Analytics > Analytics Settings > Tracking > Site configuration and Domain settings, you may be able to update the settings needed to track the site under analytics with the updated domain. You can read more about this in the article Configuring domains and removing unwanted domains in Analytics. If you are not sure how to configure this properly or have a complicated subdomain setup, you may want to contact Siteimprove support for help with this setup. 

Any complete URL matches used within Analytics settings should be reviewed and updated if necessary.

Exact URL matches may have been used in the following areas:

• Groups - Review the group matches and edit if necessary.
• Filters - Review matches on filters that include the Page visits element.
• Behavior Maps - It is necessary to add the Behavior Map page URLs again.
• Funnels - Funnels that include a complete URL will need to be edited/replicated to reflect the new URL structure.
• User Journeys - User Journeys matches should be added with the new URL.
• Key Metrics - Key Metrics that include a complete URL will need to be edited/replicated.
• Event tracking – Event tracking will not normally be affected by a URL change. If events are limited to a specific page then the event tracking code should be reviewed. Siteimprove support can help with this if they have set up the event tracking.

Why might I need to replicate some areas in Analytics instead of just editing the URL match settings?

With analytics, we collect historical data on user behavior. For example, we could have visitor data for both

https://www.examplesite.com/mypage

from prior to a URL update and

https://www.newexamplesite.com/mypage

from after the update.

So, if you wish to analyze Behavior Map data on a page from before the change, you would use the previously added Behavior Map. To analyze Behavior Map data after the update, you will need to add the new version of the URL.

How can I change the site URL shown in Siteimprove to match my new website URL?

Please see the article "How do I edit the URL for a site being checked by Siteimprove?"