Frequently Asked Questions

After you purchase a subscription, you should receive an email asking you to set your account password along with instructions on how to log in. To log in:

1. Install the Checkbot extension via Checkbot's Chrome store page . The extension should open in a new tab.
2. If the extension was already installed, launch the extension tab by clicking the Checkbot icon in the top-right of your browser. The Checkbot icon may be hidden behind a jigsaw piece icon.
3. Click the "log in" button in the top-left. If you can't see the "log in" button, try closing the Checkbot tab and re-opening it.
4. If you need to recover your password, use the "Recover password" link at the bottom of "log in" window.

If you didn't see a set password email after purchasing:

1. Check your spam folder. This is a common issue.
2. Are you checking the right inbox? Confirm you're checking the inbox of the email address you gave when purchasing. This is a common issue for users with more than one email address.
3. Try requesting a new set password email. To do this, install then launch Checkbot, click "Log in" in the sidebar then use the "forgot your password" link.

If you're still having problems, email us with a note of the email address you gave when purchasing. If possible, forward your subscription receipt email from Paddle to help us to confirm you entered your email address correctly when purchasing.

To set your account password, install Checkbot, launch it, go to "Log in" in the sidebar and use the "forgot your password" link to send yourself a password reset email.

If you purchase a single Checkbot subscription, you can use the paid features of Checkbot on as many devices as you wish as long as you continue to make payments for that subscription. If Checkbot is later supported on additional browsers, your subscription will work for those browsers too. You are the only person who may use the subscription you've paid for. Each individual requires their own subscription and we reserve the right to cancel a subscription if a subscription is being shared.

See the pricing section for more information about the differences between the free and paid versions of Checkbot.

We will give you a full refund if you let us know you're not satisifed within 14 days of starting a new subscription plan. This applies to new customers only. If you get a refund, you will immediately lose access to the paid features your subscription unlocked. To start the refund process, contact us with the email address and "order number" from your purchase receipt that would have been emailed to you from "Paddle". We issue refunds as soon as we can on our end but the refund payment can take about 5 business days to arrive back in your account (often much sooner). It's optional, but if you don't mind, please also tell us why you're asking for a refund so we can improve the product. Thanks!

If you cancel your subscription, the features your subscription unlocked will be unavailable to you after the time you've already paid for has expired. For example, if you purchase a yearly plan and cancel 9 months later, you'll lose access to the paid features 3 months after the cancellation date. You can cancel your subscription at any time.

To cancel your subscription, email Paddle (help@paddle.com) including a note of the email address you used to purchase your subscription and your order number. You can find your order number on the receipt email you should have received when you paid for your subscription on a line that looks like Order number: #1234567.

Before the checkout process is complete, you should be given the option of entering a VAT ID which will exempt your purchase from a sales tax charge. If you think you've been incorrectly charged for VAT, please contact help@paddle.com and they will be able to issue a VAT refund to you. Paddle handle all our transactions and will be able to help you.

When you're charged, you will receive an invoice for your subscription by email. There should be a link in the email that says view your invoice, where you can add/edit your invoice address. Click this link to add your VAT ID and address to the invoice.

When you're charged, you will receive an invoice for your subscription by email. There should be a link in the email that says view your invoice. Click this link to get the address and VAT ID of Paddle who process our payments. Paddle acts as a reseller and Merchant of Record so they handle VAT on our behalf.

You need to contact help@paddle.com to request a new invoice. Please provide the email address you bought the subscription with and any extra details that might help.

After you've added Checkbot to Chrome, you should see a small Checkbot icon in the top-right of your browser window. When you click this icon, Checkbot will launch. You should see a prompt asking you which URL you want to start crawling from.

Checkbot will run on any operating system that the Google Chrome browser can run on. This includes macOS, Linux, Chrome OS and Microsoft Windows.

Right now, Checkbot is only available for Google Chrome.

To perform crawls, Checkbot has to be able to fetch URLs from potentially any website. The only way to do this in Chrome at this time is if Checkbot asks for the "read and change all your data on the websites you visit" permission. This permission is used by Checkbot for the sole purpose of processing URL responses requested by Checkbot during crawls within the tab Checkbot runs inside. Checkbot does not interfere with your regular browsing in any way. We'd love to be able to ask for less permissions but (similar to other powerful and popular extensions for Chrome) this currently isn't possible.

Checkbot is not a web service: all crawling and other functionality is performed locally on your own machine. This has the benefit that you can crawl as many sites as you want as often as you want which wouldn't be practical on a web service shared between many users.

This is a rare Chrome error that impacts extensions in general that prevents installation from succeeding. You should try clearing your browser cache and cookies , restarting your machine and then attempting to install Checkbot again. Please let us know what worked for you as it isn't clear yet how to reliably fix this.

Google Chrome should transparently check for and download updates to Checkbot in the background within a few hours of a release being uploaded to the Chrome Web Store. You need to close and restart Checkbot for a recently downloaded update to be applied. If you want to force Chrome to check for and apply an update you can visit the chrome://extensions/ URL and press the "Update extensions now" button. Be aware that doing this will restart Checkbot and you'll lose your current progress.

You can see which version of Checkbot you're running by launching the extension and reading the version number from the corner of the start page. The version number is also displayed in your list of installed extensions if you visit the chrome://extensions/ URL.

We post on Twitter and Facebook about new releases so you can follow us on social media to keep up with the latest changes. You can also sign up to our newsletter to keep up with Checkbot news.

If you're having any problems using Checkbot or have ideas for new features and improvements, please feel free to contact us . Please fill out a bug report if you think you've found a bug.

If Checkbot gives your site a low score in any category, we would recommend you address the critical problems and whichever issues you consider important but we wouldn't recommend you aim to get a perfect score. It's close to impossible for a moderately complex website to get full marks and even the Checkbot website has to make some concessions. For example, fixing some minor issues might require 1) major overhauls of your backend 2) for you to switch to a hosting solution that supports the customisations you need or 3) a third party script provider to make changes for you. Only you can decide which issues are important and practical to fix for your own website.

For each report, in the bottom right next to the search bar you should see a blue "export" button. Click that button and the current table will be exported as a CSV file. If you've searched for anything, the file contents will be filtered by your search term also.

In the sidebar on the startup screen, there's an option to ignore URLs by pattern. See the help text there for tips on how you can give a list of regular expressions to ignore sets of URLs which match particular patterns. For example, you could ignore all URLs ending in ".png", URLs to "example.com" or URLs containing the path "/login" to stop Checkbot from checking URLs you're not interested in.

Checkbot does not currently execute JavaScript. Some of the reasons for this are that many websites don't use JavaScript to modify the core contents of their pages and running JavaScript during crawls would significantly slow the speed we could check pages along with other complications. We're currently focused on features that give quick feedback for sites that don't rely on JavaScript execution. You should also consider than many search bots do not execute JavaScript, search bots that do might have trouble indexing your particular JavaScript code, and some users might have JavaScript disabled.

Checkbot does not execute JavaScript or send cookies during crawls so if your analytics solution requires these to work, Checkbot won't get tracked. If your analytics solution tracks visits when HTML pages, image URLs or similar are requested, you'll need to add some way to filter Checkbot from your logs.

Sometimes Checkbot might report a problem on a web page you don't see yourself when you visit that page in your browser. This can be for a number of reasons. For example, the page could be changing its behaviour based on the user agent or cookie contents, or because JavaScript execution is required.

Some websites have anti-scraping protection in place that block bots or give CAPTCHA challenges. If this behaviour is based on the user agent string, you can try changing the user agent setting used when Checkbot performs crawls. Beyond this, your only option is to get the administrator of the website to add an exemption for Checkbot somehow such as by user agent or IP address.