When a report is compared with an earlier one, usually your baseline, it adds a Before and after section.
Your baseline
The baseline is the first full audit of your site, frozen so it can’t change later. Every comparison and the trend chart start from it. If your site is rebuilt or the scope changes a lot, we may set a new baseline. The old one is kept, and the report says why.
The counts
Issues are matched across reports by a fingerprint: what’s wrong, on which kind of element, in which part of the page. So the same problem is recognized even if the page moved things around.
- Fixed: in the earlier report, gone now.
- Remaining: in both.
- New: not in the earlier report. Usually new content or a plugin update.
- Rule change: appears or disappears because the testing rules changed, not because your site did. Listed separately so it isn’t mistaken for a fix or a regression.
The section also lists page changes (pages added or removed from scope) and criteria status changes (for example, 1.4.3 Contrast went from “not met” to “met”).
Comparing with the previous report
Monitoring reports compare with the previous published report by default, so you see what changed since last time. The index chart on your site page always goes back to the baseline.