July 2023 - Including sitemaps details screen, new resolved redirect type metric, improved redirect chain metrics, customizable render timeouts, and data only crawl sources

Filtering Accessibility Reports by Traffic

Release Date: July 25 2023

We’ve added traffic data to the accessibility reports, so you can focus your attention on issues affecting the pages getting the most visitors. To enable these metrics, you will need to have Google Analytics and Google Search Console connected to the Lumar platform.

Once connected, the following new aggregated metrics will be available as columns in reports:

  • GA Page Views - Aggregated page views from Google Analytics
  • GA Visits - Aggregated visits from Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics
  • GSC Clicks - Aggregated clicks from Google Search Console

Find out more about filtering Lumar accessibility reports by traffic.

Discouraged Viewport Types Correction

Release Date: July 21 2023

The Discouraged Viewport Types report had an incorrect scope which resulted in it having a disproportionate impact on health scores. This has been corrected so you may see an increase in Mobile Indexability, Indexability and overall health scores.

Sitemap Details Screen

Release Date: July 20 2023

We’ve launched a new screen to show all the data available for a specific Sitemap which was included in the crawl.

Whenever you see a Sitemap URL shown in reports, you can click it to reach the new screen. You’ll see all the metrics available, metrics which have changed, and all the URLs in the crawl which were found in the Sitemap.

Animated GIF of the Lumar platform, showing clicking through to the new Sitemap Details page from a report in Lumar Analyze.

New Resolved Redirect Type Metric

Release Date: July 20 2023

We’ve added a new metric to determine if a redirecting URL is part of a chain of permanent redirects, or if any redirect steps are temporary.

The metric will show a value of either permanent or temporary for any URL which is a redirect.

Improved Redirect Chain Metrics

Release Date: July 20 2023

The design showing redirect chains in reports has been improved to make the redirect type (301, 302, JS or Meta) easier to interpret for each step.

Screenshot of the redirect chain section of a report in Lumar Analyze, showing the types of redirect within the chain.

Increased Limit of Connected Google Accounts to 100

Release Date: July 20 2023

In the Connected Apps screen, we only showed the first 15 Google Accounts you had connected to your Lumar Account, so you weren’t able to see any new ones. We've changed this so you can now see up to 100.


Customizable Render Timeouts

Release Date: July 20 2023

Previously we used a fixed timeout setting of 15 seconds when fetching and rendering pages. If the rendering had not fully completed during this time, the page would be marked as Failed.

You can now customize the rendering timeout setting. It is possible to increase the maximum timeout above 15 seconds if required, however this can have an  impact on the cost of crawling. Please contact your Customer Success representative or support for more details.

Screenshot of step 4 of the crawl setup in Lumar Analyze, showing the JavaScript Rendering section, with the render timeout option highlighted.

Data Only Crawl Sources

Release Date: July 20 2023

Until now, whenever you included a crawl source in a project (such as Sitemaps or Google Search Console), we would add all the URLs to the crawl. 

We now have an additional setting for crawl sources to pull data only. When activated, we’ll collect data about any URLs which have been crawled from other crawl sources, but we won’t crawl any URLs which are unique to the source.

For example, you can run a crawl with Sitemaps and Google Search Console enabled, but with Search Console set to Data Only. This would crawl all the URLs in the Sitemaps, and provide Search Console metrics for those URLs, but would not crawl any URLs from Search Console which were not in the Sitemaps.

Screenshot of step 1 of the crawl setup in Lumar Analyze, showing the backlinks source selected and opened, and the toggle for data only crawls highlighted.

Lumar Logo Navigates to App Home

Release Date: July 20 2023

Old habits die hard, and many people still expect to be able to navigate back to the root of the application when clicking the logo, so now that’s what happens.

New Product Updates Beacon

Release Date: July 18 2023

To improve how we communicate new features, improvements and changes to you, we've implemented a new product updates beacon which you'll find in the bottom left corner of the screen.

Screenshot of Lumar Analyze with the new Product Updates Resource Center in the bottom left of the screen highlighted.

In this resource center, we'll make you aware of newly released functionality in the announcements section, and any bug fixes, report changes or other amendments in the improvements section. We've also included a release notes section, so we'll update there when a new release note is available. In the past we've done this on quite an ad-hoc basis, but we're now aiming to provide monthly release notes so you can read more details of what's been released or improved.

Robots.txt Support for Resource Fetching

Go Live Date: July 17 2023

To aid in the discovery of pages, robots.txt directives were not obeyed for resources fetched during rendering. We’ve now added a setting to obey robots.txt for resource fetching which is visible in Advanced Settings > Rendering. It is enabled by default on new projects but it has not been enabled on existing projects and must be enabled manually as it may change the results of the crawl.

Google Analytics 4 Connector

Go Live Date: June 19 2023

With standard Universal Analytics properties no longer processing data from 1st July, our team had been working on an updated Google Analytics Connector that went live in June. We will continue to support GA3 for at least another year, for those customers using GA360. Find out more about the GA4 connector, and how to update your projects for GA4 data.