About our scanner

What it is

Website Checkup is a free checkup of church websites, run by ChurchPlugins. Our scanner looks at a website the way a first-time guest would: can they find service times, directions, a way to give and who leads the church?

Why it visited your site

Someone asked for a free checkup of your website. Usually that's someone from your church, or the person or agency who looks after your site. The scanner only visits websites someone has asked about. It doesn't roam the web.

How it visits

• It reads about 20 public pages, once for each checkup someone asks for.
• It reads your robots.txt file first and follows it.
• It fetches no more than 4 pages at a time, so it won't slow your site down.
• If a page is built by JavaScript and comes back nearly empty, it opens that page in a browser hosted by Cloudflare, with the same User-Agent and the same robots.txt rules. Those visits come from Cloudflare's network, and Cloudflare also marks them as automated. We block common analytics and ad scripts on those visits, so they shouldn't appear in your numbers.
• It only reads public pages. It never logs in, fills in forms or posts anything.
• It says who it is. Every request carries this User-Agent:

  Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; WebsiteCheckup/1.0; +https://checkup.churchplugins.com/bot)

• If your site turns it away, it accepts that. It never tries again in disguise. The checkup simply says it couldn't read the site.

How to block it

Add these lines to the robots.txt file at the root of your website (for example, yourchurch.org/robots.txt):

User-agent: WebsiteCheckup
Disallow: /

Rules for WebsiteCheckup take priority over rules for all bots (User-agent: *), so this blocks only our scanner, not search engines. If your robots.txt already blocks all bots, it blocks ours too. The name isn't case-sensitive.

Questions

Email us at support@churchplugins.com.