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Website Health

Website Health Check: What It Tests and How to Fix Issues

By SuperSiteReport Team · Updated · 7 min read

A website health check is a structured review of how secure, fast, crawlable and usable a site is. It tests HTTPS and certificates, security headers, page speed and Core Web Vitals, on-page SEO, accessibility basics and email DNS, then ranks problems by severity so you fix what hurts visitors and search visibility first.

Most site owners only look closely at their website when something breaks: rankings drop, a browser shows a certificate warning, or a client says the contact form is slow. A regular health check catches those problems earlier. This guide explains what a good check covers, how to read the results, and the order to fix things in. You can run every test below for free with the Super Site Report checker.

What does a website health check actually test?

A complete check looks at the site the way three different visitors do: a person on a phone, a search engine crawler, and a browser enforcing security rules. Each one notices different failures.

Area What is tested Why it matters
Security HTTPS redirect, certificate validity and expiry, HSTS, Content-Security-Policy, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, framing protection, cookie flags Browsers warn on broken HTTPS, and missing headers leave visitors exposed to clickjacking and injected scripts.
Performance Server response time, page weight, compression, caching headers, image formats, render-blocking resources, Lighthouse lab metrics Slow pages lose visitors, and Core Web Vitals are part of Google’s page experience signals.
SEO Title, meta description, canonical, headings, robots directives, robots.txt, XML sitemap, structured data, Open Graph tags Search engines need clear signals to crawl, understand and display a page well.
Accessibility Language attribute, image alt text, form labels, viewport settings, colour contrast (via Lighthouse) Accessible pages work for more people and usually for search engines too.
Email and DNS SPF, DMARC and CAA records These stop other people sending mail as your domain and limit which authorities can issue your certificates.

Super Site Report weights these areas and turns them into a 0–100 score and a letter grade. The exact weights, severity points and caps are published on the methodology page, so you can see why a site got the grade it did.

How often should you run a website health check?

Run one after every significant change and at least once a month otherwise. Significant changes include a theme or plugin update, a hosting or CDN move, a redesign, a new tracking script, or a DNS change. Those are the moments when headers get dropped, redirects loop, or a staging noindex tag leaks into production.

Certificates deserve extra attention. Public TLS certificates are getting shorter lifetimes under the CA/Browser Forum’s Baseline Requirements, so automated renewal matters more each year. Our SSL certificate guide covers the timeline.

How do you read a health check score?

Treat the score as a summary and the list of issues as the real output. Two sites can both score 72 for very different reasons: one might have a slow server and good security, the other a fast server and no security headers at all.

Severity is what matters when prioritising:

  • Critical issues break the site for some visitors or remove it from search. Examples: an expired certificate, a homepage set to noindex, a page that returns an error status, or a site with no HTTPS at all. Super Site Report caps the score below 50 while any critical issue is present, because nothing else matters until it is fixed.
  • High issues cause real but partial harm, such as a certificate that expires within a week, insecure scripts on an HTTPS page, a robots.txt that blocks the whole site, or a very slow server response.
  • Medium and low issues are improvements: a missing HSTS header, a missing meta description, uncompressed assets, or images without modern formats.

What should you fix first?

Work through problems in this order. It front-loads the fixes that protect visitors and indexing, and leaves the fine-tuning for later.

  1. Availability and HTTPS. The site must load over HTTPS with a valid certificate, and HTTP should redirect to HTTPS with a single 301.
  2. Indexing blockers. Check for stray noindex tags, a robots.txt that disallows everything, and canonical tags pointing to the wrong URL.
  3. Security headers. Add HSTS, X-Content-Type-Options, a Referrer-Policy and framing protection. These are usually a few lines of server config; see our security headers guide.
  4. Server response time. A slow time to first byte delays everything else. Page caching often fixes it on WordPress.
  5. Core Web Vitals. Work on Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift. Our Core Web Vitals guide explains each one.
  6. On-page SEO polish. Unique titles and descriptions, one clear H1, structured data, and social preview tags.

Which free tools can you use for a website health check?

No single tool sees everything, so it is normal to combine a few. All of these are free:

Tool Best for Data type
Super Site Report One combined report covering security headers, TLS, SEO tags, DNS records, a multi-page crawl and Lighthouse Live checks plus lab data
PageSpeed Insights Lighthouse plus real-user Core Web Vitals from the Chrome UX Report Lab and field data
Google Search Console Indexing status, crawl errors and search queries for a site you own Google’s own data
Bing Webmaster Tools Indexing and crawl data for Bing, which also feeds several AI assistants Bing’s own data

Lab data, like a Lighthouse run, is a controlled test on one device profile. Field data comes from real Chrome users and only exists once a site has enough traffic. Use lab data to debug and field data to confirm that real visitors see the improvement.

What is the difference between a one-page check and a site crawl?

A single-page check tests one URL in depth. A crawl follows internal links and samples many pages, which catches problems a homepage test misses: broken internal links, missing titles on deeper pages, duplicate descriptions, and pages that accidentally carry noindex.

Super Site Report does both. It analyses the page you enter in detail, crawls up to 25 internal pages for site-wide issues, and runs a mobile Lighthouse audit. Results are saved as a public report at /report/your-domain/, so you can compare changes over time. You can browse examples on the reports index.

How does a health check help with search and AI visibility?

Search engines and AI answer engines can only cite pages they can fetch, parse and trust. The technical basics a health check covers are the same things these crawlers rely on:

  • a robots.txt that does not block the crawlers you want (see our robots.txt guide);
  • an XML sitemap listing your canonical URLs (see our XML sitemap guide);
  • fast, stable HTML that renders without errors;
  • structured data that describes the organisation, the page and its author.

Google’s SEO Starter Guide is a good plain-language reference for the content side.

What does a health check look like on a WordPress site?

WordPress powers a large share of the web, and its problems tend to repeat. When Super Site Report detects WordPress, the fix tips in each report include the setting or plugin type that usually resolves the issue. The most common findings are:

  • No page cache. Every request runs PHP and database queries, which shows up as a slow time to first byte. A caching plugin or a server-level cache such as nginx FastCGI caching fixes this.
  • Exposed version details. The generator tag, readme files and open XML-RPC endpoints tell attackers which version is running. Hardening guidance is in the WordPress hardening handbook.
  • Heavy themes and plugins. Page builders and sliders often load large scripts on every page, which hurts Interaction to Next Paint on phones.
  • Unoptimised images. Large uploads served as-is make Largest Contentful Paint slow. WordPress creates responsive sizes automatically, but the original upload still needs to be reasonable.
  • Out-of-date PHP. Older PHP versions stop receiving security fixes. The PHP supported versions page lists which branches are still maintained.

Our WordPress speed guide walks through the performance fixes in order.

Frequently asked questions

Is a website health check free?

Yes. Super Site Report is free and needs no account. Enter a domain on the homepage and the report is ready in under a minute, including a mobile Lighthouse audit when the queue is not busy.

Will a health check slow down or harm my website?

No. A check makes a small number of normal HTTP requests, similar to one visitor browsing a few pages. Super Site Report identifies itself with its own user agent, limits the crawl to 25 pages and caches results.

Why is my score different from PageSpeed Insights?

PageSpeed Insights scores only performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO through Lighthouse. Super Site Report blends a Lighthouse run with its own security, DNS and crawl checks, so the two numbers measure different things. Lighthouse scores also vary a little between runs.

Can I check a website I do not own?

Yes. Every test uses publicly available information, such as response headers, HTML and DNS records. Site owners can ask for a public report to be removed through the link on each report page.

What is a good website health score?

Aim for 80 or above (a B or better), with no critical or high-severity issues. A site can still rank with a lower score, but each unresolved issue is a risk to visitors, security or search visibility.

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