Keep up with the latest features, improvements and bug fixes added to Checkbot for Chrome . To make sure you’re running the latest version, see the FAQ page. Please fill out a bug report if you think you’ve found a bug and feel free to contact us if you have any feature requests.

Version 2.0.11

  • optimised

    Reduced memory usage when crawls are performed

  • optimised

    Reduced size of extension by stripping out unused code from internal libraries.

Version 2.0.0

  • new

    URL requests from Checkbot now contain a X-Requested-With: Checkbot header so servers can identify Checkbot.

  • new

    Removed the setting to change the User-Agent to reduce the number of extension permissions Checkbot asks for. You can still customise the User-Agent if required via Chrome DevTools .

  • improved

    Upgrade from Chrome Extension Manifest v2 to Manifest v3 because Google is deprecating Manifest v2. This required significant internal changes and allowed the webRequestBlocking extension permission to be removed.

  • improved

    Use valid JavaScript report: The validator now understands JavaScript features up to ECMAScript 2023.

  • improved

    Use valid CSS report: The validator now understands modern features like :is, :has, CSS nesting and container queries (thanks Bjarne!).

  • improved

    Use minification report: Reduce false positives by increasing the allowed whitespace vs text ratio.

  • improved

    Improved contrast of field labels in the sidebar.

  • fixed

    Explore reports: Fixed problem where the number of reports were misaligned in some browsers.

Version 1.4.0

  • improved

    Reworked implementation to require less Chrome permissions than before. If you have Checkbot installed already, you might get a pop-up asking you to confirm the permissions being used. As before, Checkbot needs the permissions it asks for to download URLs from any domain so it can perform crawls on any website you might asked to be tested.

  • improved

    Dashboard changes: The web page preview has been replaced with a summary of the crawled URLs and shortcuts to relevant reports.

Version 1.3.9

  • improved

    Improved error messages and suggested help when the start URL of a crawl fails to load.

  • improved

    Move “log in” button to top-left of sidebar to make it easier to find.

Version 1.3.7

  • optimised

    Reduced the resources used when processing URLs during crawls.

  • optimised

    Load fonts locally to improve start up time.

Version 1.3.2

  • improved

    If you press the extension launch button when the Checkbot tab is already open in another window, that window and tab will now be brought into the foreground.

  • fixed

    CSV exports should now work for text containing Chinese characters.

Version 1.2.9

  • fixed

    Fix for page titles word counts being too long sometimes because newlines were being counted.

Version 1.2.6

  • fixed

    Fix for HTTP Auth password sometimes not being set when edited.

Version 1.2.3

  • improved

    Improved the instructions on the start screen and the dashboard to help new users get started.

Version 1.2.1

  • improved

    Increased contrast of colours in sidebar (thanks Rhonda!)

  • improved

    The extension tab now automatically opens on first install.

  • fixed

    Fixed error that happens if you refresh the tab when the dashboard is showing.

Version 1.2.0

  • new

    PDF reports: You can now produce a PDF report from the sidebar that gives a breakdown of how the crawled website scored for each category and each best practice. Use these reports to give a quick overview of the health of a site and to keep track of progress.

  • improved

    The alt attribute text from <img> tags is now considered text content inside <h1> tags.

  • improved

    Added a sidebar notification that takes you to the release notes when there’s been an update.

  • optimised

    Crawls now start up faster and when they’re stopped they finish quicker.

Version 1.1.0

  • new

    New “Set H1 headings” report that checks every page has an H1 heading.

  • new

    New “Use one H1 heading per page” report that checks every page has a single H1 heading.

  • new

    New “Use optimal length H1 headings” report that checks for pages with excessively long H1 headings.

  • new

    New “Use unique H1 headings” report that checks every page has a unique H1 heading.

  • new

    Added more report shortcuts to the dashboard with percent bars so you can look for anything unusual at a glance.

  • improved

    Page title reports now have a page title column so you can sort by title.

  • improved

    Data URIs used in image tags now appear in missing ALT tags reports with the label “Data URI image” for their URL instead of being blank.

  • improved

    The login dialog now gives better feedback if there’s connection issues and if there were issues checking your subscription (thanks Jorge!).

  • fixed

    Fix for some page title, description and other text not being displayed properly when containing HTML entity codes e.g. “&” should be shown in place of “&”.

  • fixed

    The cursor now changes when hovering over grid column headings to indicate they’re sortable.

  • fixed

    The URLs added to crawls to test “not found” pages are no longer counted as failing URLs in the crawl progress dialog.

  • fixed

    The dashboard now shows “0%” instead of a blank score if your site somehow scored nothing.

  • fixed

    Prevent bug reporter dialog being shown multiple times when a bug is detected.

Version 1.0.3

  • improved

    Added check for absolute canonical URLs to guidelines and test going by Google’s recommendations.

  • improved

    Added more report shortcuts to the dashboard (indexable pages, 2xx URLs, 3xx URLs) and grouped together related shortcuts.

  • improved

    Upgraded Sentry bug tracking library to improve crash reports.

  • improved

    Improved readability of crawl progress text.

  • fixed

    Fixes for how redirecting URLs are displayed.

Version 1.0.2

  • fixed

    Fixes for visual issues with reports on small screens.

  • fixed

    Fix for occassional error when dashboard is displayed.

Version 1.0.0

  • improved

    User agent now identifies as “Checkbot” instead of Chrome’s default user agent.

  • improved

    “Avoid inline CSS” rule renamed to “Avoid excessive inline CSS” for clarity.

  • improved

    “Avoid inline JavaScript” rule renamed to “Avoid excessive inline JavaScript” for clarity.

  • fixed

    Fix for malformed email addresses in forms causing errors.

  • fixed

    Fix for “Avoid render-blocking JavaScript” help text: to avoid render-blocking behaviour, “script” tags can be placed before the closing “body” tag, not after (thanks Александр Степанов!).

Version 0.5.0

  • new

    Added login and password recovery functionality to allow for paid accounts.

  • improved

    Improved styling of start page, sidebar and dashboard.

  • improved

    Reduced memory usage during report generation.

  • improved

    Significantly reduced lag when switching between reports containing many rows.

  • improved

    Removed lag when ending crawls when many URLs were crawled.

  • improved

    Faster generation of results for sites with many inlinks and outlinks.

  • improved

    Faster table rendering when there are many rows.

  • improved

    Added “non-indexable pages” shortcut to the dashboard.

  • improved

    Increased allowed amount of inline CSS and JavaScript per page in guidelines.

  • improved

    Added privacy and terms links to the sidebar.

  • fixed

    Fix for links to online guide sometimes not jumping to the correct bookmark.

  • fixed

    Fix for app startup occassionally failing.

  • fixed

    Fix for file minification detection sometimes saying minified files weren’t minified.

  • fixed

    Fix for some table cells not being word wrapped properly.

Version 0.4.0

  • new

    “Set canonical URLs” report added which checks all pages have valid canonical URLs set. This will catch a variety of issues such as if you accidentally declare more than one canonical URL per page, if you incorrectly use relative URLs and if the canonical URL points to a non-canonical page.

  • improved

    The “Use compression” report will now only recommend you compress URL responses that are larger than 1,000 bytes as compressing small files can actually increase the response size (thanks Ryan!).

  • improved

    Font size and spacing tweaks so more URLs are visible at once when viewing reports.

  • improved

    Sped up table cell rendering to reduce lag when scrolling quickly.

  • improved

    The duplicate page content and canonical URL reports have been moved together into a new subcategory called “Duplicate content”.

  • improved

    Added a sidebar link to a contact form for sending general comments and questions.

  • improved

    The crawl timer now shows the number of hours elapsed so the timer doesn’t look like it’s resetting to zero when one hour is reached.

  • improved

    Added “URLs” label to “Explore” menu item for clarity.

  • fixed

    Fix for the “Use HSTS preload” report incorrectly flagging 31,536,000 seconds as too low for the “max-age” setting. Thanks Tim!

  • fixed

    When a URL response includes several headers with the same name, the values of all those headers will now be shown when the “view headers” shortcut is used.

  • fixed

    When you refresh a URL in a report table that’s not in the main “URL” column, that row should still be visible after the refresh is complete.

Version 0.3.3

  • improved

    Added a link to our privacy policy to the analytics opt-in dialog.

  • improved

    Clarified in the “Avoid render-blocking JavaScript” guideline that “async” and “defer” do not apply to inline JavaScript.

  • fixed

    Fix for crawls sometimes failing if the start URL redirects. Thanks Marijo!

Version 0.3.2

  • fixed

    Fix for the CSS validator taking a long time to check non-CSS files that are labelled as CSS files.

Version 0.3.1

  • improved

    Cleaned up consistency of hover and select effects for menu items.

  • fixed

    Disabled the browser spell checker on URL form fields.

  • fixed

    Fix for cached responses sometimes being used when you ask Checkbot to refresh a URL.

Version 0.3.0

  • new

    Bulk export: You can now export all reports in one click via a sidebar button. This generates a ZIP file containing a CSV file for each report.

  • new

    Pages that have a meta refresh URL are now viewed as redirects instead of pages. This is more in line with how they’d be treated by humans and search bots. This reduces false positives in several SEO reports and improves reports that take redirects into account.

  • new

    Added a new “Broken URLs” report to the “Explore” category. This combines the URLs from the 4xx, 5xx and connection error reports. A shortcut to this report has been added to the summary screen so you can quickly view all your broken URLs in one place.

  • new

    Redirect chains that are too long are now flagged as URLs that fail to load.

  • new

    The CSS validator now understand CSS variables, CSS grid and more vendor specific selectors.

  • new

    If there’s a problem fetching the start page when starting a new crawl, there’s now a link you can use to quickly ask for help.

  • improved

    There’s now specific error feedback if you try to start a crawl with a URL that contains invalid characters.

  • improved

    When you search for text, the search feature now only considers the visible text and not the text hidden inside cells that represent lists of items.

  • improved

    The “/page-not-found” URLs that are used to check for 404 responses should now be hidden from SEO reports where you wouldn’t care about them.

  • improved

    Added a warning if you try to close the Checkbot tab when a crawl is in progress.

  • improved

    Added a note in the “Use compression” report to be aware that antivirus on your own machine that scans HTTP traffic has been known to disable HTTP compression before responses reach your browser.

  • improved

    Clarified in the “Avoid duplicate resources” report text that cached responses cannot be used if URLs differ by protocol or query parameter order.

  • improved

    Updated several of the report names for consistency and clarity.

  • improved

    Timestamps in exported filenames are now more human readable e.g. “2018-03-12 18.31.05”.

  • fixed

    On Windows, you should no longer get a false warning you’re about to close the Checkbot tab when you export files.

  • fixed

    The “Avoid duplicate pages” report was taking the page title into account and preventing duplicates from being detected.

  • fixed

    For reports that find duplicates, each row should show a sample of the duplicates found up to a maximum of 10. Before, the upper limit wasn’t always being used.

  • fixed

    The CSS validator error messages no longer mention the line number twice.

  • fixed

    Meta refresh URLs were sometimes being parsed incorrectly to include extra quotes and spaces.

  • fixed

    Fixed a problem that caused the “Use 404 code for broken links” report to be blank when you refreshed URLs.

  • fixed

    Fix for redirect path lengths sometimes being incorrect when several redirect paths overlapped each other.

Version 0.2.0

  • new

    In the crawl settings, you can now provide a list of regex patterns to tell Checkbot which URLs to ignore during crawls.

  • new

    Added distinct icons with tooltips for indexable, canonicalised and “noindex” pages to help you tell them apart.

  • new

    The sidebar now contains a shortcut for going to the FAQ page and for sending a bug report.

  • improved

    URLs from “rel=canonical” tags are now crawled.

  • improved

    Added more advice on how to find a solution if a site fails the “Return 404 for broken links” test.

  • improved

    Increased length of page “description” columns so long descriptions aren’t clipped to make it easier to audit your text.

  • improved

    Updated the button labels and tooltips to make it clearer that you can 1) “refresh” the report results for a single URL only and 2) “clear & recrawl” to wipe the current results and perform the same crawl again from scratch.

  • improved

    Added a hint to the “Use HSTS preload” report that you should take care to capitalise “includeSubDomains” correctly when setting HSTS headers. Thanks to Vlad for pointing this out via the first ever bug report form submission (your email address didn’t work!).

  • improved

    Added some spacing around the “restore defaults” and “new crawl” buttons to reduce accidental clicks.

  • optimised

    Improved the speed of switching between reports with many rows.

  • fixed

    Relaxed the minimum browser window size restrictions as these were stopping some users from seeing the “export” button.

  • fixed

    Table columns will now automatically resize when you resize the browser window.

  • fixed

    “20x”, “30x”, “40x” and “50x” reports renamed to “2xx”, “3xx”, “4xx” and “5xx”.

  • fixed

    Fixed the table row alignment in the “Summary” view.

Version 0.1.48

  • new

    Added a link to the release notes from the start page that changes colour when a new version has been installed.

  • improved

    Whenever you close the Checkbot tab, the Checkbot extension restarts itself to force downloaded updates to be applied to make sure you’ve got the latest version.

  • improved

    The “Hide server version data” report now ignores the “Server” header if a version number is not seen in the header value. This stops values like “Netlify” and “Cloudflare” which are too vague to matter being flagged.

  • improved

    The headers flagged by the “Hide server version data” report are now shown in a list instead of being displayed in a single row.

  • improved

    The help text for “Use compression” has been improved to make it clearer which URLs require compression.

  • fixed

    The “Avoid inline JavaScript” report no longer identifies structured data scripts as JavaScript.

Version 0.1.47

  • improved

    Reports with zero results have their result count dimmed to improve readability.

  • optimised

    Large tables should now scroll more smoothly.

  • fixed

    Export button and dashboard score should be fully visible on smaller screens.

  • fixed

    Using the enter key when a crawl is in progress should not start a new crawl.

Version 0.1.46

  • improved

    Increased maximum recommended length of page meta descriptions for “Use optimal length descriptions” report.

  • improved

    CSV export filenames now include the report name, website hostname and a timestamp.

Version 0.1.44

  • improved

    The URL of the previously open tab is only used as the crawl URL on startup if that URL is not a Chrome Web Store page. This behaviour is less confusing to users who just installed the extension and started it on the Store page.

Version 0.1.43

  • improved

    Expanded the help text for reports in the “explore” category.

  • fixed

    Extension would sometimes fail to load if you were offline during start up.

Version 0.1.39

  • new

    “Indexing” section added to the “explore” category which includes reports for “Indexable pages”, “Non-indexable pages”, “Pages without canonical tag”, “Pages with canonical tag”, “Canonicalised pages” and “Self-canonical pages”.

  • improved

    Duplicate title, page and description reports now only compare indexable internal pages instead of all internal pages.

  • fixed

    Layout tweaks to support smaller screen sizes.