Note: The Site Activity log is available for Webflow Enterprise customers and Enterprise partners. Any team member in the Designer (using Design mode or Edit mode) can see the Site Activity log and its details.
You can use the Site Activity log to track and diagnose important changes to your site, including what changes were made, when they were made, and by whom.
In this lesson, you’ll learn:
When to use the Site Activity log
The Site Activity log is a panel (called Site Activity) located on the left side of the Designer.
The Site Activity log gives you and your teammates valuable visibility into the most important changes made to your site, and can help with the following 3 scenarios:
Disaster recovery
When you or your team discover a site issue, it can be difficult to diagnose and slow to locate the change that caused the issue — it may even require you to restore your site from a backup. To avoid this time consuming process, you can use the Site Activity log to quickly determine which change caused the issue and get a fix in place.
Team visibility
You may find it difficult to keep track of your site’s progress when you’re working on a large team with multiple ongoing initiatives. You can use the Site Activity log to gain visibility into your teammates’ work to understand which changes have been made. This is also valuable for teams working with partners – the team gains visibility into the partner’s work, and the partners gain visibility into the team’s work.
Publish readiness
You can also use the Site Activity log to filter and view the status of site changes. This is useful if you want to review unpublished changes and reduce the risk of publishing in-progress work. You can also review changes published to your staging subdomain for visibility into site updates that are ready to go live to production.
How to use the Site Activity log
To get familiar with the Site Activity log, let’s walk through:
- Which activities are tracked
- Which activities aren’t tracked
- How activities are tracked
- How to use Site Activity log filters
Which activities are tracked
The Site Activity log tracks 10 of the most important changes made to your site:
- Class changes — includes class creation, modification, and deletion. This covers global classes, base classes, combo classes, HTML tags, and states. Interactions added, modified, or deleted from classes are tracked. Class changes on page branches are also tracked.
- Component changes — includes component creation, modification, and deletion. Interactions added, modified, or deleted from components are also tracked.
- Variable changes — includes variable creation, modification, and deletion
- Custom code changes — includes custom code creation, modification, and deletion. This covers custom code changes made in Site settings, Page settings, and via HTML embeds, but doesn’t include HTML embeds in rich text fields in CMS items.
- CMS — includes creation, modification, and deletion of Collection items and CMS Collections. This includes changes made in the Editor.
- Settings — includes changes to page settings and changes to custom code in Site settings
- Backups — includes backup creation and restoration. This covers manual backups and system-generated backups.
- Page modifications — includes page creation, deletion, duplication, renaming, modification of the HTML structure of a page (including the addition, deletion, or reordering of elements), element and page interactions modification (creation, modification, and deletion), and static content changes from either the Designer or the Editor.
- Page branch activity — includes branch creation, deletion and merging
- Publish events — includes site publish and unpublish events from the Designer, Editor, and Dashboard. Publishing to multiple domains results in multiple publish events.
Note: Activities are tracked on the site level (not on the page level or Workspace level).
Each tracked activity shows:
- The date and time of the activity (using your local timezone)
- Which team member made the change
- On which page branch an activity took place (if the activity took place on a page branch)
Note: Some activities, like bulk CMS activities and Page modified activities, will show up as one activity in the Site Activity log. Bulk CMS activities display with the number of items changed (e.g., “20 items added to Blog Posts”). Page modified activities display the number of elements changed on a page (e.g., “5 changes to Contact Us”).
The Site Activity log displays 50 activities before a “Load more activity” button appears. Click the button to reveal additional past activities. The Site Activity log displays up to 1 year of activity history.
You can also press the “collapse all” or “expand all” activities icon in the top right of the Site Activity log to be able to quickly parse through a high volume of activity logs organized by days.
Which activities aren’t tracked
The Site Activity log doesn’t track all changes made to a site. For example, it does not track:
- Descriptions of the changes that were made to classes, components, or custom code (e.g., button class modified: color changed from #0000FF to #00FF00)
- Changes to Workspace settings
How activities are tracked
Activities are only tracked when your site is saved. This means that if you make a change and undo it before the site saves, it will not show up in the Site Activity log. To ensure changes record to the Site Activity log, you can save your site in 2 ways:
- Manually save your site by pressing Command + Shift + S (on Mac) or Control + Shift + S (on Windows)
- Rely on automatic site saves (e.g., sites auto-save after 10 seconds of inactivity, or every 30 seconds while active)
Most activities recorded in the Site Activity log are view-only, with the exception of 3 activities that can be clicked to show more information:
- Press the “eye” icon next to Backup created activity to open the backup preview in a new tab in view-only mode
- Press the “list” icon next to Class modified activity to show a list of elements affected on the current page, on other pages, and any affected components
- Press the “list” icon next to Branch merged activity to show changes made on the branch that were merged into the main site
When you open the “list” icon next to a Class modified activity, you can click an element in the “Elements affected on this page” section to navigate directly to that element. If you click an element in the “Elements affected on other pages” section, you’ll be taken to the page where that element lives. Then, you’ll need to click it in the “Elements affected on this page” section in the Site Activity log to navigate directly to that element.
Keep in mind you won’t be able to click a component to navigate to its instance(s).
All activities are static. This means that old activities won’t be updated when you make changes to the site. For example:
- If you rename a page, the Site Activity log will continue to show the previous name of the page in old activities
- If you publish the site, then unpublish it, the old publish activity will remain in the Site Activity log
- If you make a backup, then delete that backup, the old backup activity will remain in the Site Activity log, but clicking it will return an error
Good to know: You can view older activities by clicking the “Load more activity” button at the bottom of the log.
How to use Site Activity log filters
You can also filter the activities in the Site Activity log by using the Filter dropdown in the Site activity panel. Select the changes, activities, and/or authors you want to filter by and then click Apply filters.
To reset any filters you’ve set — and include all activities in the Site Activity log — go to the Site activity panel and click Reset.
Changes
- All changes — all changes made to the site
- Unpublished changes — which site changes have not been published
- Published to staging — which site changes have only been published to staging
- Published to production — which site changes have been published to production
Activity
- Classes — class creation, modification, and deletion. Also includes interactions added, modified, or deleted from classes.
- Components — component creation, modification, and deletion. Also includes interactions added, modified, or deleted from components.
- Variables — variable creation, modification, and deletion
- Custom code— custom code creation, modification, and deletion. This only includes changes made in Site settings, Page settings, and via HTML embeds (i.e., this doesn’t include HTML embeds in rich text fields in CMS items).
- CMS — creation, modification, and deletion of Collection items and CMS Collections
- Settings — changes to page settings and changes to custom code in Site settings
- Backups — backup creation and restoration
- Page modifications — including page creation, deletion, duplication, renaming, modification of the HTML structure of a page (including the addition, deletion, or reordering of elements), element and page interactions modification (creation, modification, and deletion), and static content changes from either the Designer or the Editor.
- Branch events — page branch creation, deletion, and merging
- Publish events — site published or unpublished
Author
You can filter by activities by author, which includes authors from both the Designer and the Editor.
- All authors — site activities from all authors
- Specific author — site activities from that author