Website Health Check: What to Test and How Often

A website health check is a structured review of everything that keeps your site running, accessible, and performing well. It covers uptime, page speed, SSL certificates, DNS configuration, security, and SEO fundamentals. Most site owners do these checks reactively, after something breaks. The ones who do them proactively catch problems before they become outages, ranking drops, or security incidents.

This guide covers what a health check should include, how often to run each type of check, how to decide between manual and automated approaches, and how to build a routine that actually sticks. For a broader look at ongoing monitoring, see the website maintenance and monitoring guide.

What a Website Health Check Covers

A thorough health check looks at six areas. Some need daily attention. Others are fine on a weekly or monthly schedule.

Uptime and Availability

The most basic check: is your site up? Can visitors load it? Uptime checks verify that your server responds to HTTP requests with a successful status code (200 OK) within an acceptable time frame.

What to test:

• HTTP status code. Is the homepage returning 200? Are key landing pages responding correctly?
• Response time. How long does the server take to respond? A response time that has gradually increased over weeks often signals a problem building up.
• Multi-location availability. Is the site reachable from different geographic regions? A site can be up in North America but unreachable from Europe due to CDN issues, DNS propagation delays, or regional server failures.

How often: Daily at minimum. Ideally, every few minutes via automated monitoring. Uptime is the one area where manual checks are impractical. By the time you manually check and find the site is down, visitors have already been affected. For more on uptime monitoring, see what is uptime monitoring.

SSL/TLS Certificates

An expired or misconfigured SSL certificate breaks HTTPS, triggers browser warnings, and drives visitors away. Modern browsers display a full-page warning that most users will not click through.

What to test:

• Expiration date. When does the certificate expire? Certificates typically last 90 days (Let's Encrypt) or one year (commercial CAs).
• Certificate chain. Is the full certificate chain valid? An incomplete chain works in some browsers but fails in others, especially on mobile and older systems.
• Protocol version. Are you supporting current TLS versions (1.2 and 1.3) and rejecting deprecated ones (1.0 and 1.1)?
• Mixed content. Is the site loading any resources over HTTP on HTTPS pages? Mixed content triggers browser warnings and can block resources from loading.

How often: Weekly checks are sufficient if you have automated expiry alerts. Without alerts, check every few days during the last month before expiry. For step-by-step SSL testing, see how to check an SSL certificate.

DNS Configuration

DNS is the layer that translates your domain name to your server's IP address. DNS problems make your site unreachable even if the server is perfectly healthy.

What to test:

• A/AAAA records. Do they point to the correct IP addresses?
• CNAME records. Are they resolving to the right hostnames?
• MX records. If you receive email on the domain, are mail records correct?
• Nameserver delegation. Are the nameservers listed at your registrar matching the ones at your DNS provider?
• TTL values. Are time-to-live values appropriate? Very low TTLs increase DNS lookup times. Very high TTLs make changes slow to propagate.

How often: Monthly under normal circumstances. Check immediately after any DNS changes, hosting migrations, or domain transfers. For a breakdown of record types, see how to check DNS records.

Page Speed and Performance

Slow sites lose visitors. Google uses page speed as a ranking signal. A site that loads in 2 seconds versus 5 seconds will have measurably different bounce rates and conversion rates.

What to test:

• Core Web Vitals. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). These are Google's primary performance metrics.
• Total page weight. How many kilobytes (or megabytes) does the page transfer? Large images, unminified JavaScript, and unused CSS are common culprits.
• Number of requests. How many HTTP requests does the page make? Each request adds latency, especially on mobile connections.
• Time to First Byte (TTFB). How long before the server sends the first byte of the response? High TTFB points to server-side performance issues.
• Render-blocking resources. Are CSS and JavaScript files blocking the initial page render?

How often: Weekly for your most important pages. Monthly for a full-site audit. Test after any deployment that changes frontend code, images, or server configuration.

Security

Security checks catch vulnerabilities before attackers do. A compromised site can serve malware, get blacklisted by Google, and destroy user trust.

What to test:

• Malware and blacklist status. Is your site flagged by Google Safe Browsing, Norton Safe Web, or other security services?
• Software versions. Are your CMS, plugins, and server software up to date? Outdated software is the most common attack vector.
• HTTP security headers. Are you sending headers like Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, and Strict-Transport-Security?
• Open ports and services. Are any unnecessary ports open on your server?
• File integrity. Have any core files been modified unexpectedly?

How often: Monthly for manual reviews. Security monitoring tools should run continuously. For a deeper look, see the website security monitoring guide.

SEO Fundamentals

SEO health checks ensure search engines can find, crawl, and index your content correctly. Small technical issues can quietly suppress your search visibility for weeks before anyone notices.

What to test:

• robots.txt. Is it blocking anything it should not? Is it allowing everything it should?
• XML sitemap. Does it exist, is it valid, and does it include your important pages?
• Meta tags. Do key pages have title tags and meta descriptions? Are any duplicated?
• Canonical tags. Are canonical URLs correct and consistent?
• Indexing status. Are your important pages indexed in Google? Are any pages unexpectedly excluded?
• Crawl errors. Are there 404s, redirect loops, or server errors in Google Search Console?

How often: Weekly for crawl error monitoring. Monthly for a comprehensive audit. Check immediately after any site restructure, URL changes, or CMS migration.

Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Schedule

Not every check needs to happen at the same frequency. Here is a practical schedule.

Daily (automated):

• Uptime and availability
• SSL certificate validity
• DNS resolution

Weekly:

• Page speed for top 5-10 pages
• Crawl error review in Google Search Console
• Security scan for malware and blacklist status

Monthly:

• Full DNS configuration review
• Comprehensive page speed audit
• Security header review
• SEO audit (sitemaps, robots.txt, meta tags, indexing)
• Software version check (CMS, plugins, server)
• Backup verification (do backups exist and can they be restored?)

Quarterly:

• Full security penetration test or vulnerability scan
• Performance baseline comparison (are things getting faster or slower over time?)
• SSL/TLS configuration review (protocol versions, cipher suites)

Automated vs Manual Checks

Some checks must be automated. Others benefit from human judgment.

Automate These

Uptime monitoring is the clearest case for automation. You cannot manually check your site every 5 minutes, and the cost of missing a 3 AM outage is real. Automated monitoring catches failures within minutes and alerts you immediately.

SSL expiry alerts prevent the most avoidable type of outage. A monitoring tool that warns you 30, 14, and 7 days before expiry gives you time to act without panic.

DNS monitoring catches unauthorized changes, propagation failures, and nameserver issues that would otherwise go unnoticed until users start reporting problems.

Scheduled security scans run outside business hours and check for known vulnerabilities, malware injections, and blacklist entries without requiring anyone to remember to do it.

Keep These Manual

Page speed analysis benefits from human interpretation. A tool can tell you that LCP is 3.2 seconds, but deciding whether to prioritize image optimization, server-side caching, or JavaScript reduction requires context about your site and audience.

SEO audits require judgment calls. An automated tool flags duplicate meta descriptions, but deciding which description to keep, which to rewrite, and which pages to consolidate requires understanding your content strategy.

Security header configuration should be reviewed by someone who understands your application. Adding a strict Content-Security-Policy without understanding your third-party scripts will break functionality.

Tools for Each Check Type

Uptime

Automated monitoring services check your site from multiple locations on a set interval and alert you via email, SMS, or Slack when something goes wrong. Look for services that check from at least 3 geographic regions to reduce false positives from single-location network issues.

SSL

SSL checking tools verify your certificate chain, expiration date, protocol versions, and cipher suites. Most monitoring services include SSL checks. For one-off checks, online tools that display certificate details and flag problems are widely available.

DNS

DNS lookup tools query your records from multiple resolvers and compare results. They can detect propagation issues, misconfigured records, and nameserver problems. Some monitoring services include DNS record monitoring that alerts you when records change unexpectedly.

Page Speed

Google PageSpeed Insights and Chrome Lighthouse are free and widely used. For ongoing tracking, web performance monitoring tools record Core Web Vitals over time so you can spot trends. Real User Monitoring (RUM) gives you speed data from actual visitors, which is more accurate than synthetic tests.

Security

Website security scanners check for known vulnerabilities in your CMS and plugins, scan for malware, and verify your site is not on any blacklists. Google Search Console also reports security issues affecting your site.

SEO

Google Search Console is the primary tool for SEO health. It reports crawl errors, indexing status, and search performance. Dedicated SEO auditing tools crawl your site like a search engine and flag technical issues.

Building a Health Check Routine

A health check process only works if someone actually follows it. Here is how to make it stick.

Start with automation. Set up uptime, SSL, and DNS monitoring first. These are the checks with the highest cost of failure and the lowest effort to automate. Once these run on their own, you have a safety net for the most critical issues. See the website monitoring checklist for a full setup walkthrough.

Schedule recurring reviews. Add a monthly calendar event for the manual checks. Block 30-60 minutes. Having it on the calendar makes it happen. Relying on "I'll do it when I have time" means it never happens.

Document your baseline. Record your current performance numbers, security configuration, and DNS records. When you check next month, you need something to compare against. A health check without a baseline is just a snapshot, not a trend.

Create a checklist. Write down every check you run, in order. A checklist prevents you from skipping steps when you are busy. The website maintenance plan resource has a template you can adapt.

Assign ownership. If you work on a team, assign each check type to a specific person. Shared responsibility means nobody feels personally accountable, and checks get skipped.

When to Escalate

Not every issue found during a health check requires immediate action. Use this framework to prioritize.

Act immediately if your site is down, your SSL certificate has expired, DNS records are pointing to the wrong server, or a security scan finds active malware.

Act within 24 hours if your SSL certificate expires within 7 days, page speed has degraded significantly, Google Search Console reports a spike in crawl errors, or a security scan finds outdated software with known vulnerabilities.

Schedule for this week if page speed is slightly slower than last month, there are a few new 404 errors, meta tags need updating on some pages, or security headers are missing but no active threat exists.

Add to the backlog if performance optimizations would help but are not urgent, SEO improvements are incremental, or configuration is functional but not following current best practices.

References

1. Google PageSpeed Insights
2. Google Search Console
3. Google Safe Browsing - Site Status
4. Mozilla Observatory - HTTP Security Headers