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Ignore views and links

UI Coverage includes every URL your tests visit, but not every URL is relevant to your testing goals. This guide walks through finding irrelevant views and links in your report and excluding them with viewFilters, so your coverage score reflects the parts of your application you own and intend to test.

Ignoring views and links helps in the following scenarios:

  • Third-party pages: Exclude external URLs, such as OAuth login pages or embedded content, that you don't control or need to test.
  • Non-critical pages: Remove views that aren't part of your testing goals, such as informational pages or admin-only sections.
  • Error pages and redirects: URLs that tests visit incidentally don't represent meaningful user flows.
  • Links you never plan to test: Links pointing to excluded URLs are removed from reports and scores, so they stop appearing as untested elements.

By ignoring unnecessary views and links, you maintain clear and actionable coverage metrics.

After recording your tests to Cypress Cloud, review the UI Coverage report:

  1. Navigate to the UI Coverage tab in your test run.
  2. Look for views that consistently appear but don't require testing.
  3. Review untested links for destinations no test should ever visit.
  4. Note the URLs, paths, or patterns for these views and links.

Common candidates for exclusion​

  • Third-party authentication pages (for example, https://auth.example.com)
  • Redirects or intermediate URLs (for example, /redirect)
  • Informational pages with few or no interactive elements (for example, /terms or /privacy)

viewFilters rules in the App Quality configuration exclude views and links based on their URLs. To add or modify the configuration for your project, navigate to the App Quality tab in your project settings and add a viewFilters configuration.

Rules apply in order, and the first rule whose pattern matches a URL decides whether it's included or excluded. URLs that match no rule are included by default. Some common view filter configurations are shown below:

Exclude a third-party page​

App Quality Config
{
  "viewFilters": [
    {
      "pattern": "https://auth.example.com/*",
      "include": false,
      "comment": "Exclude the external login flow"
    }
  ]
}

Include only your application's URLs​

The catch-all * rule excludes everything the earlier rules don't include, and must come last.

App Quality Config
{
  "viewFilters": [
    {
      "pattern": "http://localhost:3000/*",
      "include": true
    },
    {
      "pattern": "*",
      "include": false
    }
  ]
}

Exclude error pages in every environment​

Patterns without a protocol and hostname match on any environment your tests run against.

App Quality Config
{
  "viewFilters": [
    {
      "pattern": "/404",
      "include": false
    },
    {
      "pattern": "/error/*",
      "include": false
    }
  ]
}

To learn more about the options, pattern matching behavior, and validation rules, refer to the viewFilters configuration reference.

After saving the configuration, regenerate a recent run from its Properties tab to reprocess it with your new filters. You don't need to rerun your tests. See Setting configuration for how to regenerate a report.

In the regenerated report, confirm that the ignored views no longer appear and that links to the excluded URLs no longer count as untested elements. If a URL you excluded still appears, see troubleshooting view filters.

If new unnecessary views or links appear in future reports, update your filters accordingly to keep reports clean and actionable.

See also​

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