Running a comparison
Two dropdowns at the top: pick an older audit and a newer one. Results appear as soon as both are selected. Until then you’ll see Select two audits to compare — “Choose an older and newer audit above to see how your site has improved”.Stat cards
Resolved and New are the cards that matter. Score change is a net figure and hides offsetting movement: a crawl that resolves 30 issues and introduces 28 barely moves the score while telling you something important about your deploy process.
Category breakdown
A table with one row per issue category:
This is where a fix is confirmed or contradicted. Work on meta tags should show
meta_tags falling and everything else flat. If links rose at the same time, the change that fixed your titles broke something else.
Comparing fairly
The comparison is only meaningful if the two crawls are alike:- Same page limit. A 50-page crawl against a 500-page crawl reports hundreds of “new” issues that were always there and simply weren’t crawled before.
- Same target URL. Crawls starting at different paths cover different pages.
- Enough time between them. Comparing two crawls from the same afternoon measures crawl variance, not progress.
A working loop
- Run an audit and note the score.
- Fix the errors from the issue list, starting with sitewide patterns.
- Run a second audit with the same target URL and page limit.
- Compare them.
- Read Resolved and New together, then check the category rows.
Related
- Audit issues — what each category contains
- Run an audit — matching scope between crawls
- Reports — putting audit progress in front of a client