Scan timing and manual re-crawls

Scanfully finds broken links and broken media with two crawls: a links crawl and a media crawl. Both load your pages from the outside, like a visitor. The Content screen always shows the results of the most recent finished crawls.

When Scanfully crawls

• When you add a site: both crawls are queued straight away, so the first report arrives soon after.
• Every week: the links crawl runs on Thursdays and the media crawl on Fridays, for every active site. Each weekly crawl loads your pages fresh; the media crawl reuses the pages the links crawl loaded the day before.
• When you ask for it: with Re-crawl on the Content screen, or Save and re-crawl in the crawl settings.

A crawl can take from a few minutes to much longer on a large site. While it runs, the Content screen shows its progress, and the Crawl coverage panel says when each crawl last finished and how long it took. Crawls also show under Jobs & runs.

Ask for a new crawl

1. Open the site’s Content screen.
2. Click Re-crawl.

Scanfully queues a new crawl of both links and media and confirms with “We queued a new crawl of links and media.” A crawl you ask for loads every page afresh, which makes it the quickest way to confirm a fix.

Before a site’s first crawl, the button is Start the first crawl in the middle of the screen.

How often you can ask

You can ask for a crawl of each kind once every 60 minutes per site. Asking sooner shows how long to wait, for example “You can request a crawl once every 60 minutes. Try again in 25 minutes.” When only one of the two crawls was asked for recently, the other is still queued.

A crawl that is already queued or running for the site is not queued a second time.

Why a fix may not show right away

Scanfully does not watch your site continuously; results change only when a crawl finishes. A broken link or file you fixed stays in the report until the next crawl confirms it works. The same goes for new breakage: it shows up after the next crawl.

When a crawl finishes, it replaces the previous results:

• new broken links and media are added,
• the ones that still fail get a new last checked date,
• the ones that work again, or are no longer on your pages, leave the report.

The current report stays visible while a new crawl runs.

Changes to the crawl settings apply from the next crawl. Ignoring a link or media file is the exception: it disappears from the report as soon as you save.