Sitebulb’s Lost and Found feature is designed to help you track changes to key metrics, verify implemented fixes, and identify the emergence of new issues from audit to audit.
Lost and Found compares the key URL metrics and hints triggered by your current audit with the most recent preceding audit in the Project. You’ll find Lost and Found data in two key areas of your Audit, the Audit overview and Internal report overview, and all Hints lists.
Lost and Found metrics in Overviews
In the Audit Overview, you’ll find the Lost and Found table under the Core crawl data metrics.
The Lost and Found section provides a comparison of key metrics between this audit and the preceding audit within this project. You find a breakdown for all URLs crawled, Internal URLs, External URLs, and Resources metrics.
Sitebulb identifies changes in the total number of URLs for each metric, and also compares the lists of pages between audits to identify URLs that were lost and any newly found pages.
At the right end of the table, you’ll find the following data columns:
URLs: The total number of URLs in this audit corresponding to the relevant metric (e.g. Internal URLs)
Change: The difference in the number of URLs in this audit and the previous audit in this Project.
Remained: The number of URLs that were present in both the current audit and the previous audit.
Found: The number of URLs that were found in the current audit, but were not present in the previous audit.
Lost: The number of URLs that are not present in the current audit, but were present in the previous audit.
You will also find the Lost and Found table in the Internal report overview, outlining the changes to key internal metrics, including the total number of HTML pages crawled, Successful, Not Found, Error, and Forbidden URLs.
Click on any of the blue metrics in these tables to jump into a URL List of the corresponding pages:
Lost and Found in Hints Lists
You will also find Lost and Found as a tab at the top of your Hints list views.
This tab compiles a list of all the hints triggered in this audit or report, with a series of metrics that benchmark the changes between this audit and the previous audit completed in this Project.
Within the table, you will find the following data columns:
URLs: The number of URLs that triggered this hint in the current report.
Change: The difference in URLs that triggered the hint between this audit and the previous audit in this Project.
Remained: URLs trigger the Hint in both the previous and current audit.
Found: URLs trigger the Hint in the current audit, but were not present in the previous audit.
Lost: URLs that are not present in the current audit, but were found and triggered the Hint in the previous audit.
Regressed: URLs that trigger the Hint in the current audit, but were found and did not trigger the Hint in the previous audit.
Fixed: URLs that previously triggered the Hint. They were found in this audit, but did not trigger the Hint.
How to use Lost and Found
The Lost and Found features can be used for a variety of purposes as you audit your websites. As you run new audits within a project and build a historical record of the data, Lost and Found can help you:
Quickly identify changes to the website by monitoring increases or decreases in the total number of HTML URLs crawled.
Monitor the emergence of new issues, like a sudden increase in errors, not found, or forbidden URLs
Verify the implementation of fixes between audits, which should result in a decrease in pages triggering the relevant hints
Monitor the rise of new issues by identifying new pages triggering specific hints (Found URLs)