Catch SEO, schema, performance, and content issues before you deploy. Three ways to point Greadme at a site that isn't live yet.
Buy a domain from any registrar and use it as your dedicated testing URL, kept separate from your real production domain. The most stable, team-shareable setup — perfect for long-term use.
Deploy your dev build to a free hosting service. You get a permanent, public URL on a vendor subdomain like myapp.netlify.app — no domain to buy, no setup hassle.
Run ngrok http 3000, get a temporary public URL, paste it into Greadme. Done in under a minute — no deploy, no signup beyond ngrok itself.
| Method | Setup time | Cost | Same URL every time | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Real domain | ~15 minutes, plus DNS propagation | Price of the domain | Yes | Long-lived staging a whole team scans |
| Free hosting | Minutes, from a Git push | Free | Yes | Solo projects and side projects |
| Tunnel | Under a minute | Free tier | No — a new URL each restart | A quick check while you're still coding |
Greadme fetches your page from our servers, the way a search engine would, so the address you paste in has to be reachable from the public internet. Three things commonly stop a site that's still in testing:
localhost, 127.0.0.1, private ranges such as 10.x, 172.16–31.x and 192.168.x, and hostnames ending in .local or .internal are refused before any request goes out. That's exactly the gap a tunnel fills: it hands your local server a public address for as long as it runs.
Testing sites usually ship with Disallow: / to keep search engines away. If the page you enter is disallowed, the crawl stops before it starts — and that attempt is not counted against your quota. Relax the rule for the page you want to test, or point the scan at a copy that permits crawling.
If the site sits behind a WAF (a web application firewall, the filter that blocks suspicious traffic), the scan comes back reporting a block page instead of your content. Allow the scanner with Organization Auth, which proves the request is ours with a secret key rather than a user-agent string anyone can copy.
Sites in testing normally carry a noindex tag, so the report will flag Search Engines Blocked from Page. On a testing URL that result is correct — the tag is doing its job. Note it, ignore it there, and confirm it has disappeared when you scan production.