Changes to how RAMP discovers pages

We have made some exciting upgrades to how RAMP discovers the pages of your website. The following article outlines these changes, what you can expect, and how they benefit you.

We are always trying to improve our system’s ability to find and report on accessibility issues. A crucial part of this is finding pages to monitor! If RAMP doesn’t know which pages it should be looking at, how would it ever uncover accessibility issues? Currently, RAMP has 3 different page discovery modes that allow our system to find pages and content on your website for monitoring.

These Page Discovery Modes include:

1. Automatic
2. Advanced
3. Off

“Off” means that you, as the user, are responsible for manually adding or importing pages into RAMP. “Advanced” mode allows you to point RAMP in the right direction by telling it where your XML sitemap file is located. With this information, RAMP routinely checks the sitemap and adds new pages as it finds them.

The recent page discovery changes concern our most convenient and popular option: Automatic. Previously, automatic page discovery relied on your website having a valid and well-structured XML sitemap under the hood. This saved a step but was still troublesome for sites that didn’t have XML sitemaps we could find. Now, automatic page discovery crawls your site naturally, much like search engines do, and no longer relies on or uses XML sitemaps. This enables us to find pertinent content quickly on nearly any website without any setup from you. Here is what this means for you if you have websites utilizing automatic page discovery:

• If you have an invalid or missing XML sitemap, our systems will now be able to discover and begin monitoring pages for you.
• If you have a comprehensive sitemap on a website with 10s of thousands of pages, you may notice new pages are not found as quickly (or at all) if they are too buried in your site and not easily findable.

We think this change will facilitate website monitoring and cut down setup steps. If you wish to continue using XML sitemap-based page discovery, select the Advanced page discovery mode.

Please reach out if you have any questions or need help configuring your RAMP account. We’re excited to hear your feedback our our web accessibility tools! Please don’t hesitate to send your thoughts and suggestions through our feedback form. As always, our support team is happy and available to help answer any questions or troubleshoot.