Siteward Pro 0.15: Visual Update Checks and PageSpeed Scores

Siteward Pro 0.15 checks every site’s pages after each update and tells you when one comes back looking different, with before and after screenshots. It also tracks each site’s Google PageSpeed scores every week, and Siteward Reports 1.5 puts those scores in your client reports. Siteward 0.17.8, free, makes rollback alerts clearer. All of it is available now through the normal WordPress update screens.

An update can leave a site online and still break it. A theme update that drops the homepage’s layout, a plugin that stops a stylesheet loading, a page that suddenly shows a PHP error halfway down: the site still answers, so uptime monitoring stays green, and the first person to notice is usually the client. Visual update checks are there to catch that within minutes of the update instead.

Visual update checks (Pro)

Whenever a site’s plugins, themes or WordPress change, whether the update ran through Siteward or not, your dashboard waits a couple of minutes for caches to settle, then loads the homepage and up to three other pages you choose and compares them with how they looked before:

• Does the page still load? A page that now returns an error is caught straight away.
• PHP errors. A fatal error or WordPress’s critical error message on the page.
• Missing content. Most of the visible text gone, or most of the layout’s elements gone.
• Stylesheets and scripts. Any of the site’s own CSS or JavaScript files that stopped loading, which is how a “nothing looks right” update usually shows up.

A page that changed raises a Visual change flag on the Sites page and sends one alert by email or Zapier. The site’s page lists what was updated and what changed on which page, with It looks fine, accept the change, Check again now and a shortcut to Roll back an update. A clean check quietly becomes the new baseline.

The checks run from your own dashboard, a few light page requests per site, and nothing is sent to us. They work with the free Siteward Child as well as Siteward Advanced Child. Turn them on under Siteward → Settings → Visual update checks.

Before and after screenshots (Pro)

Some breakage only shows up visually, so the checks can also take a screenshot of the homepage before and after each update and compare the two. The screenshots come from Google PageSpeed Insights, which loads the page in Google’s own Chrome, so nothing heavy runs on your dashboard or on our servers. You use your own free Google API key: it takes about two minutes to set up and the free allowance of 25,000 checks a day covers any fleet.

A homepage that looks very different after an update is flagged, with both screenshots side by side. Homepages that change on their own are handled so they do not raise false alarms:

• Videos, embeds and sliders (YouTube, Vimeo, autoplay video and the common slider plugins) still show their screenshots, but never raise the flag from screenshots alone.
• Popups and cookie banners (MailerLite, OptinMonster, Elementor, Popup Maker, Klaviyo, CookieYes, Complianz and others) need a much bigger difference before they flag, since a popup may or may not be open when Google takes the picture.
• A big difference is confirmed first with a second screenshot a few minutes later, so a slideshow we did not recognise is not flagged either.

PageSpeed scores for every site (Pro)

With the same Google key, Siteward scores every site’s homepage each week, for mobile and desktop:

• A PageSpeed column on the Sites page, with a score ring for mobile and desktop next to each site. Hover for the details behind the score: first paint, largest paint, blocking time and layout shift.
• Sort the fleet by score. Click the column heading to put the slowest sites, or the fastest, at the top.
• History on each site’s page, so you can see whether a site is getting faster or slower week to week.

Run against our own fleet of nearly 250 sites, the middle site scored 70 on mobile and 87 on desktop, and the slowest dozen were obvious at a glance. Google calls are kept well under its default limits, so scoring a whole fleet just takes a little longer rather than failing.

Site speed in client reports (Siteward Reports)

Siteward Reports 1.5 adds a Site speed section, straight after the summary cards: the homepage’s mobile and desktop scores, the date Google measured them, the change since the month before, and three plain-language measures a client can follow (how quickly the main content appears, how long the page is busy, and how much the layout moves while loading). Sites without scores leave the section out, and you can switch it off under Sections to include.

Clearer rollback alerts (free)

When a safe update breaks a site and is rolled back, the site checks itself straight afterwards. On a slow host that check can land before the site has settled, so the alert used to say the site still showed errors when it was fine seconds later. Siteward 0.17.8 now looks at the homepage again before sending the alert, and says so when it is loading normally. This release also hardens how the dashboard talks to the sites it manages, and adds a short “what’s new” note under the Siteward header after an update, which goes away once you have read or closed it.

How to update

1. On your Siteward dashboard, go to Dashboard → Updates and update Siteward to 0.17.8. The PageSpeed column needs it.
2. If you have Pro, update Siteward Pro to 0.15 and Siteward Reports to 1.5 from the same screen.
3. Open Siteward → Settings → Visual update checks, turn on the page checks, and add a Google API key for screenshots and scores. The settings page walks you through getting one.

New to Siteward? Get it free on WordPress.org. It manages unlimited sites with no per-site fees, and Siteward Pro adds visual checks, PageSpeed scores and the rest of the Pro tools. The full list of changes is on the changelog.

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