How to Monitor Changes in Websites with Visualping and Receive Alerts

Monitoring visual and code changes in web pages is a very important task that any system administrator should perform. One of the most typical attacks against websites is defacement , an attack whose objective is to change the appearance of our website. Today in this article we are going to show you how Visualping.io works , the most popular tool to monitor changes in the webs, and also changes in the source code of the page.

Visualping Features and Operation

The operation of the Visualping tool is very simple, we will simply have to enter the web page that we want to monitor , the tool will automatically take a screenshot of how the web is at a certain moment, and will continue to monitor the status of the web every 5 minutes at least and every 1 week at most. If a change is detected, it will notify us by email immediately to inform us of what has happened on our website, or on any other website that we are monitoring.

Monitor Changes in Websites with Visualping and Receive Alerts

Visualping notices are made via email, Slack, Webhook, or via an API. We can also configure the notice so that it only looks at the visual aspect of the web , on the text within the web , and even on specific elements of the web page that we are monitoring. This last option allows you to check in detail the source code of the web page and not the pixels as is the case with the visual option.

Other interesting features are that it allows you to monitor only certain regions of the web page, and not all of it, this is ideal to “fixate” on a specific area and avoid false positives because another part of the web that does not interest us has been modified. It also allows you to configure whether we want it to notify us with small , medium or large changes, this is also ideal to avoid false positives of an unauthorized change on the web page.

Finally, if you are an advanced user or a webmaster, you will be able to execute certain actions before taking the screenshot of the web page, in the following video you can see all the details:

To access these advanced actions and use them correctly, we recommend you visit this complete Visualping tutorial for advanced requests .

So you can monitor web pages

The first thing we have to do is enter the official Visualping website, in the main menu, without the need for registration, we can put the URL or domain of the website that we want to monitor, as you can see below:

By clicking on “Go”, Visualping.io will automatically load the web, in this case the web of this article, and now is where we can choose which part or areas we want to monitor, or if we directly want to monitor the entire main screen.

At the bottom is where we can put our email address to send alerts by email, something essential to find out as soon as possible that there has been a change on the web. In the area on the right we have the possibility of configuring the periodicity of the «checks» , that is, of the checks.

We can also configure if we want to check visual, text or element changes.

If we choose the visual changes, we can configure the area that we want to monitor, if we want to use some type of Proxy to make the request to the web page (just in case Visualping is blocked) and even notify us by email if there has been a small or medium change or a big change on the web since the last time.

In the case of defacement attacks, the «keyword» section is very useful, this allows us to monitor whether a word or several appear on the web, and if so, it will also warn us, since we could have been attacked.

As you have seen, monitoring the appearance, text and elements of a web page is really easy with this tool.

Visualping is completely free for a very basic and personal use , but with limitations, it will only allow us to monitor two pages with a periodicity of one day, in case you need to check your website more often, and even monitor more pages, you must buy the different paid subscriptions.

In the following screenshot you can see the paid subscriptions that we can buy if we are going to carry out the checks daily:

If you want to make checks every 5 minutes, the only plan you can hire is the “Intensive 10K”:

We must bear in mind that the most expensive plans are aimed mainly at companies that are specifically dedicated to the web, since with the “Basic” and “Intensive” plans in most cases it should be enough.