Scheduling Regular Audits

8 min read
Updated Jan 25, 2026
Version 1.0+
Intermediate
Quick Answer

Schedule automatic site audits to run daily, weekly, or monthly with notifications for new issues and changes.

Maintaining optimal site health requires consistent monitoring. NitroShock's scheduled audits automatically run daily, weekly, or monthly site audits with notifications for new issues and changes, ensuring you catch technical SEO problems before they impact your rankings.

Manual audits are valuable for immediate insights, but scheduled automation ensures continuous monitoring without requiring you to remember to run checks. This approach is particularly valuable for agencies managing multiple client sites, in-house teams maintaining large WordPress installations, and SEO professionals who need to demonstrate ongoing value through regular reporting.

Setting Schedules

Scheduling automated site audits in NitroShock takes just a few minutes and provides ongoing monitoring for the lifetime of your project.

Creating Your First Schedule

  1. Navigate to your project dashboard at /project/{id}/
  2. Click the Site Audit tab
  3. Click the Schedule Audit button in the upper right corner
  4. Configure your audit parameters in the scheduling modal

The scheduling interface presents several configuration options:

Audit Scope: Choose between a single-page audit or a full site crawl. Single-page audits focus on your homepage or a specific critical page, while full crawls examine your entire WordPress site. Full crawls use credits per page audited, so consider your site size when setting up recurring audits.

Audit Depth: For full site crawls, specify the maximum number of pages to audit. You can set this to match your site size or limit it to your most important pages. NitroShock crawls in priority order, starting with your homepage and following internal links based on importance.

Target URL: Select which tracking target to audit. If you've configured multiple tracking targets in your project (such as different subdomains or international versions), you can schedule separate audits for each.

Audit Categories: Choose which technical SEO checks to run. Options include Performance, SEO, Accessibility, and Best Practices. Running all categories provides comprehensive insights, but you can focus on specific areas if you're monitoring particular improvements.

Managing Multiple Schedules

Each project supports multiple scheduled audits running on different frequencies. This flexibility allows you to:

  • Run full site crawls monthly while checking critical pages daily
  • Monitor different sections of your site on separate schedules
  • Track staging and production environments with different frequencies
  • Schedule audits for different tracking targets independently

View all active schedules in the Site Audit tab under the Scheduled Audits section. Each schedule displays its next run time, frequency, scope, and status.

Editing and Pausing Schedules

Click any scheduled audit to modify its configuration. You can change the frequency, adjust the scope, or update notification settings without creating a new schedule.

The Pause toggle lets you temporarily stop a schedule without deleting it. This is useful when:

  • Your site is undergoing major development work
  • You're running low on credits and want to conserve them
  • You need to pause monitoring during a planned maintenance window
  • You're testing changes and don't want audit notifications

Paused schedules retain all their configuration and can be reactivated instantly.

Deleting Schedules

Remove schedules you no longer need by clicking the Delete button in the schedule details. Deleting a schedule does not remove historical audit data - all previous audit results remain accessible in the Audit History section.

Before deleting a schedule, consider pausing it instead. Paused schedules don't use credits but preserve your configuration if you need to restart monitoring later.

Frequency Options

NitroShock offers three scheduling frequencies, each suited to different monitoring needs and credit budgets.

Daily Audits

Daily audits provide the most responsive monitoring, detecting issues within 24 hours of their appearance. This frequency is ideal for:

  • High-traffic WordPress sites where technical issues immediately impact revenue
  • E-commerce stores where broken pages or performance problems directly affect conversions
  • Sites undergoing active development or frequent content updates
  • Critical pages like homepages or primary conversion paths

Daily audits use credits every day, so consider scheduling them for single pages or small page sets rather than full site crawls. A common approach is daily monitoring of your 10-20 most important pages with weekly or monthly full crawls.

Weekly Audits

Weekly schedules balance comprehensive monitoring with credit efficiency. This frequency works well for:

  • Most business websites with moderate update frequencies
  • Full site crawls of small to medium WordPress installations
  • Agencies providing regular client reporting on a weekly basis
  • Sites in competitive niches where staying ahead of technical issues matters

Weekly audits run on the same day and time each week. Choose a day when you can review results and address issues promptly - many users prefer Monday mornings to catch weekend problems or Friday afternoons to prepare for the week ahead.

Monthly Audits

Monthly audits provide baseline monitoring with minimal credit usage. Consider this frequency for:

  • Large WordPress sites where full crawls are credit-intensive
  • Stable sites with infrequent updates
  • Budget-conscious monitoring of multiple client sites
  • Long-term trend analysis rather than immediate issue detection

Monthly schedules run on the same day each month. If you select the 29th, 30th, or 31st, the audit runs on the last day of months with fewer days.

Combining Frequencies

The most effective monitoring strategies often combine multiple frequencies:

The Tiered Approach: Schedule daily audits for your homepage and key conversion pages, weekly audits for major category or service pages, and monthly full site crawls to catch edge cases.

The Development Cycle Approach: Run daily audits during active development sprints, then scale back to weekly or monthly monitoring once the site stabilizes.

The Client Reporting Approach: Align audit frequency with client reporting schedules - weekly audits if you send weekly reports, monthly for monthly reporting cycles.

Auto-Notifications

Automated notifications ensure you learn about technical SEO issues immediately without constantly checking the dashboard.

Notification Types

NitroShock sends notifications for several audit events:

New Critical Issues: When an audit detects a new critical-severity problem, you receive immediate notification. Critical issues include broken internal links, missing meta descriptions on key pages, significant performance degradations, or severe accessibility problems.

Issue Resolution: When previously detected issues no longer appear in audits, you receive confirmation that problems have been resolved. This helps verify that your fixes worked as intended.

Audit Completion: After each scheduled audit finishes, you can receive a summary notification showing total issues by severity and any significant changes from the previous audit.

Audit Failures: If a scheduled audit fails to complete due to site accessibility issues, crawler errors, or other technical problems, you receive an alert so you can investigate.

Configuring Notification Preferences

  1. Open the Schedule Audit modal or edit an existing schedule
  2. Scroll to the Notifications section
  3. Toggle notification types on or off based on your needs
  4. Add recipient email addresses

By default, notifications go to your account email address, but you can add additional recipients. This is valuable for:

  • Sending critical issue alerts to your development team
  • Copying clients on audit completion summaries
  • Notifying account managers when client site issues arise
  • Including QA team members in resolution confirmations

Notification Channels

Email is the primary notification channel, delivering detailed information about audit results and changes. Each notification includes:

  • Project name and audit date
  • Summary of total issues by severity
  • List of new issues discovered
  • List of resolved issues
  • Direct link to full audit results in your dashboard

In-Dashboard Notifications: The NitroShock dashboard also displays notification badges on the Site Audit tab when new audit results are available or critical issues are detected. This provides at-a-glance awareness when you're already working in the platform.

Managing Notification Volume

For agencies managing dozens of client sites with multiple scheduled audits, notification volume can become overwhelming. Use these strategies to maintain signal-to-noise ratio:

  • Enable only critical issue notifications for stable sites
  • Disable audit completion notifications if you check the dashboard regularly
  • Use email filters to route NitroShock notifications to specific folders
  • Create separate notification lists for different client tiers
  • Adjust frequency to reduce the number of audit runs

Consider creating a dedicated email address like seo-monitoring@youragency.com for automated notifications. This allows your entire team to monitor alerts without flooding individual inboxes.

Credit Management

Scheduled audits provide valuable automation but require thoughtful credit management to avoid unexpected credit depletion.

Estimating Credit Usage

Before activating a schedule, calculate the approximate monthly credit usage:

  • Daily single-page audit: 1 page × 30 days = 30 page audits per month
  • Weekly 50-page crawl: 50 pages × 4 weeks = 200 page audits per month
  • Monthly full site crawl: 500 pages × 1 = 500 page audits per month

Multiply your total scheduled audits across all projects to estimate platform-wide credit consumption. This helps you determine appropriate credit packages and ensures you maintain sufficient balance for scheduled operations.

Credit Confirmation

When creating or editing a scheduled audit, NitroShock displays the estimated credit cost per run. This transparency lets you make informed decisions about audit scope and frequency.

Unlike manual audits that show credit costs before each run, scheduled audits consume credits automatically. Monitor your credit balance regularly to ensure schedules can complete successfully.

Low Credit Warnings

When your account balance drops below the threshold needed for upcoming scheduled audits, NitroShock sends warning notifications. These alerts give you time to add credits before schedules fail.

Default warning thresholds are:

  • First warning at 20% of estimated weekly scheduled credit usage remaining
  • Final warning at 10% remaining
  • Schedule pause when credits are insufficient for the next run

Adjust these thresholds in Account Dashboard → Settings → Credit Alerts.

Handling Insufficient Credits

If your credit balance can't cover a scheduled audit, NitroShock pauses the schedule and sends a notification. The schedule remains paused until you:

  1. Add credits to your account through Account Dashboard → Billing
  2. Navigate to Site Audit → Scheduled Audits
  3. Click the paused schedule
  4. Click Resume Schedule

The next audit runs at the regularly scheduled time after resumption. You don't lose the missed audit run - the schedule simply continues from the resumption point.

Optimizing Credit Efficiency

Maximize the value of credits spent on scheduled audits:

Focus on Changed Pages: Some sites have hundreds of pages but only update a subset regularly. Schedule full crawls monthly while running more frequent targeted audits on your blog, product pages, or other dynamic sections.

Adjust Depth Based on Site Changes: If your WordPress site isn't actively adding pages, reduce the crawl depth to cover only existing pages rather than discovering new ones each run.

Pause During Known Downtime: If your site undergoes scheduled maintenance, pause audits temporarily rather than wasting credits on failed crawl attempts.

Coordinate with Development Cycles: Increase audit frequency during active development when issues are more likely, then reduce frequency during stable periods.

Leverage Conditional Schedules: For advanced users, consider manually pausing and resuming schedules based on your actual development and content update patterns rather than maintaining year-round daily audits.

Credit Pooling for Teams

Agency and team accounts share a credit pool across all team members and projects. This centralized approach simplifies credit management but requires coordination:

  • Designate an Administrator to monitor overall credit usage
  • Review which projects and schedules consume the most credits
  • Establish internal guidelines for appropriate scheduling frequencies
  • Consider pausing schedules for inactive or lower-priority client projects
  • Regularly audit your scheduled audits to remove unnecessary automation

The Account Dashboard → Billing tab shows credit usage by project, helping identify which scheduled audits consume the most resources.

Common Questions

Can I schedule audits for specific times of day?

Currently, scheduled audits run at the time of day when you create the schedule. If you create a weekly schedule on Tuesday at 2:00 PM, it runs every Tuesday at 2:00 PM. To change the run time, edit the schedule and save it at your preferred time - the next run will occur at that new time.

What happens if my WordPress site is down when a scheduled audit runs?

NitroShock will attempt to run the audit but will fail if your site is inaccessible. You'll receive a notification about the failure, and the credits are not consumed. The schedule remains active and will attempt the next run at the regular interval. If you're performing planned maintenance, consider pausing the schedule temporarily.

Can I run a manual audit in addition to scheduled audits?

Yes, scheduled audits and manual audits are completely independent. You can run manual audits at any time from the Site Audit tab without affecting your schedule. This is useful when you've just deployed changes and want immediate verification before the next scheduled run.

Do scheduled audits track improvement over time?

Yes, all audit results - whether from scheduled runs or manual audits - are stored in the Audit History section. NitroShock tracks issues over time, showing when problems first appeared, when they were resolved, and overall trend lines for each issue category. This historical data is valuable for demonstrating SEO improvement to clients or stakeholders.

Can I schedule audits for multiple domains in one project?

If you've configured multiple tracking targets in your project (such as a main domain and subdomain, or international versions), you can create separate scheduled audits for each target. Each schedule operates independently with its own frequency and notification settings.

Next Steps

Now that you've set up scheduled audits, explore these related features to maximize your technical SEO monitoring:

  • Generate Site Audit Reports: Create branded PDF reports from audit results to share with clients or stakeholders. Visit the Reports tab to schedule automatic report generation aligned with your audit frequency.
  • Configure Project Settings: Fine-tune which pages are included in crawls and set up exclusion rules for pages you don't need to monitor. Access these options in Project Settings → Crawl Configuration.
  • Set Up Rank Tracking Schedules: Combine scheduled site audits with automated rank tracking to monitor both technical health and ranking performance. Configure rank tracking schedules in the Rank Tracker tab.
  • Create Custom Issue Filters: As you accumulate audit history, use custom filters to focus on specific issue types or severity levels. Learn more in the Site Audit documentation.
  • Integrate with WordPress: Install the NitroShock WordPress plugin to receive audit notifications directly in your WordPress admin dashboard and enable one-click fixes for common issues.

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