Auditing by template, not by page

A 500-page crawl of an online shop is not 500 pages. It is a home page, a few category pages, a few hundred product pages and a blog, each rendered from its own template. When the audit finds forty duplicate titles, it has usually found one template that does not put the product name in the title.

Reading an audit by template turns forty fixes into one.

How a URL becomes a shape

netweft decides which pages share a template from their paths alone. Each segment of a path is replaced if it looks like it varies per record:

• a number becomes :id, so /orders/1042 is /orders/:id
• a UUID becomes :uuid
• a date like 2026-10-08 becomes :date
• a segment of three or more hyphenated words becomes :slug, so /blog/what-a-crawl-costs is /blog/:slug

Two-word segments stay as they are. /my-account and /gift-cards are usually fixed routes rather than records, and collapsing them would fold a site’s whole navigation into one group.

Performance once per shape

A performance check is 50 credits a page, 50 times the cost of crawling it, and it is opt-in per audit. When it is on, netweft does not measure every page. It measures the start URL, then one page per shape it has not measured yet, up to 10 pages. Only pages that loaded are eligible, because measuring a 404 reports the speed of the error page.

So the most a performance pass can add to an audit is 500 credits, and a site with three shapes settles at 150. Measuring forty product pages would buy forty copies of one answer; what a 500-page crawl costs has the arithmetic.

Reading duplicates

Duplicate titles, duplicate meta descriptions and duplicate content each list, for every affected page, the other pages that share the value, up to twenty of them, with the full count beside it. Read that list for the pattern:

• Every page in one shape shares the value. The template writes a fixed string. Put the distinguishing attribute, the product or article name, into the template.
• Pairs of pages share it. Usually the same content at two URLs: with and without a parameter, an old path and a new one. A canonical or a redirect fixes it.
• Pages from different shapes share it. Usually a fallback value: the site’s default description, printed wherever a page has none of its own.

Thin content and orphans by shape

The same reading helps with the findings that are not duplicates. Thin content across one shape is a template with too little on it, often a listing page with no introduction. Orphan pages across one shape are a section that the navigation forgot, which internal linking from one hub page fixes for all of them.

The routine

1. Sort the findings by severity, as in reading an audit by severity.
2. Within each severity, group the affected URLs by shape.
3. Fix the template, not the page.
4. Re-run the audit. A Pro audit is up to 1,000 pages at 1 credit a page, so checking the fix costs less than looking for it did.