By knowing when the website is updated, you can stay up to date with their new content. Fortunately, there are several ways to do this, other than manually checking when you’re wondering if a site has changed.
Depending on the site you follow for updates, you may receive alerts for everything – latest news, new products, blog updates, new cars, updated software, etc. A website monitor can even be helpful in determining if goes offline.
Some websites have built-in monitoring tools that you can use to stay informed when they release new content. Others may not have these capabilities, but there are third-party services you can use to track changes to these pages.
Use our email newsletter
It is very common for websites to offer their visitors an email newsletter. They are almost always completely free and only require your email address. After subscribing, you will receive an email every time something new appears on the site.
Sometimes you can set up a newsletter to subscribe only to the type of content you want to be notified about. In other cases, the site selectively chooses when and what to email you, but this is more common on sites that rarely post important information.
Council. Not sure which email provider you are using? There are many options, including disposable email accounts, and anonymous and private email services
Subscribe to their RSS feed
RSS feeds are published by some sites so that visitors can stay updated using feed readers. You can use an Internet feed reader via a web application, download it to your computer, or download it to your mobile device using an RSS reader application.
To see if the website you want to check for updates is using RSS, look for an orange icon, probably somewhere in the corner or at the top / bottom of the page next to the search bar or around social media icons.
If you can’t find the button, most feed readers allow you to scan your website for RSS feeds and provide an easy way to subscribe to them. If your site doesn’t have an RSS feed, but you want one, try an RSS feed generator like FetchRSS
Some examples of free RSS feed readers include Feedly, The Old Reader, Feeder, Omea Reader for Windows, and Reeder for Mac.
Use a website monitoring tool
There are tools that can do the whole check for you. These special monitors are useful if the site in question does not have an RSS feed, if you do not like using news aggregators, or if the changes you want to track are not available through the RSS feed.
Visualization is one example of a tool that sends you an email every time a specific web page changes. This is useful if you want to subscribe to one page and not be notified of all new content on the site. It works when you choose which part of the page to track for changes.
You can even adjust the change sensitivity and wait a few seconds before checking for updates. Free Visualping users can check 62 times a month for free.
Distill Web Monitor is a Chrome extension, so it runs entirely in your web browser and monitors changes across all pages as well as any section of any web page. It also works with RSS feeds. Free users get 25 website monitors and up to 30 emails per month, but you can get more if you pay for the Distill.io plan.
ChangeTower is similar to these other free tools that track website changes. It can track changes on a single page or across an entire website.
ChangeTower includes a lot of really useful features that let you be notified when any content changes or adds, when the changes match the keywords you specify, the appearance of a part of the page changes, the HTML code changes, etc.
You get up to six free checks every day, with the most frequent searches set to 12 hours (you can pay for faster ones).
Follow any accounts on social media
Another good way to track changes on a website is to follow the company on their social media.
Most websites have links to their Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat you name it. Subscribe to as many as possible to get the most out of their content. When they update their site with something they want the world to see, they will make sure to post it on their social media.
Some social networking sites allow you to subscribe to certain accounts to receive notifications so that you receive an app alert or priority view when they post messages on their pages. Do this if you can to make sure you actually see the message after changing the site.
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