Getting Started¶
A 5-10 minute walkthrough from signing up to seeing your first comparison, plus where to go next for each feature.
Core concepts¶
| Concept | What it means |
|---|---|
| Project | A site or app you're tracking — one domain, permanently. |
| Environment | A deployment target for a project (e.g. staging, production). |
| Language | A locale to capture the page in. |
| Viewport | A screen size to capture the page at. |
| Page | A URL (or URL template) within a project to capture. |
| Scan | Finds pages on your site automatically instead of adding each one by hand. |
| Capture | One screenshot — a specific environment/language/viewport/page combination. |
| Monitor | Watches one page on a schedule, recapturing and comparing automatically. |
| Comparison | A diff between two captures — what changed, and how much. |
Quick start¶
1. Create your account and workspace¶
Sign up with an email and password, or with Google (see Account & Workspace). Your first Workspace is created for you — it's the billing and membership boundary that will own everything else you create.
2. Create a project¶
From your workspace dashboard, use Add project. Pick the domain you want to track (this can't be changed later) and give it a name. See Projects.
3. Add an Environment¶
Every project needs at least one Environment — where should VisualRunner actually go to take a screenshot? Add one pointing at your live site and mark it Production. See Environments.
4. Add a Language and a Viewport¶
Add at least one Language (mark it Main if your site isn't translated) and one Viewport (e.g. "Desktop," 1920×1080). See Languages and Viewports. Both are required before you can scan or capture — skipping this step is the most common reason a first scan fails with "Project has no environment to scan" or produces zero results.
5. Find your pages¶
Either run a Scan (Sitemap is fastest if your site has one) to discover pages automatically, or add a single page by hand from the Pages tab to try things out immediately. A scan's "New" pages aren't tracked until you Approve them.
6. Install the Chrome extension and take your first capture¶
Manual captures run through the Chrome extension, not the server — install it from the Chrome Web Store and sign in to Cloud mode (a separate sign-in from the dashboard). Then, from the Captures tab, select your environment/language/viewport/page and start a capture. See Captures & Comparisons.
7. See your first comparison¶
Run a second capture of the same page later (after a real or deliberate change), open the completed job, and select both captures to compare. You'll see the side-by-side/overlay/diff views and the change signals breakdown. See Comparing two captures.
8. Set up a Monitor for ongoing tracking¶
Manual captures are one-off; a Monitor watches one page on a schedule, comparing every new run against a baseline automatically and notifying you when something changes — this is the core, recurring use case most people are here for. Monitors also run server-side, so they work against environments that need auth (cookies/headers/basic auth), unlike manual captures.
Where to go next¶
- Account & Workspace — members/roles, billing, trials, custom domains, workspace storage.
- Projects — environments, languages, viewports, pages, interaction rules.
- Scans — automatic page discovery (sitemap, crawler, manual list, Excel).
- Monitors — scheduled watch-and-notify on one page at a time.
- Captures & Comparisons — on-demand screenshots and diffing.
- Review Workflow — triage every change your monitors detect in one queue.
- Collections — group captures together so they're never auto-deleted.
- Wayback — browse the full screenshot history of a page on a calendar.
- Uptime — lightweight "is it up?" checks, separate from screenshot monitors.
- QA Rules — catch text/content problems automatically on every capture.
- Notifications — the notification bell and email alerts.
- Chrome Extension — Free Local mode (no account) vs. Cloud mode.
- FAQ / Troubleshooting — common gotchas and error messages explained.