The Website Health Checklist Every Site Owner Should Run Monthly
Most website problems don't announce themselves. An SSL cert quietly approaches expiry. A third-party link you added six months ago now 404s. A JavaScript error introduced in last week's deploy breaks a form for a subset of users. A missing meta description costs you click-throughs on a keyword you rank for.
None of these are catastrophic in isolation. But left unchecked, they compound. Here's a practical checklist to run against your site regularly.
1. Uptime and Availability
Check: Is your site reachable from an external connection right now? Does it load without errors?
What to look for:
- Server returning 200 OK (not 5xx)
- No redirect loops
- Site loading in under 3 seconds on a standard connection
- No "Service Unavailable" or blank page
How often: You can't check this manually with any meaningful frequency. This is the category most suited to automated monitoring that runs every few minutes.
2. SSL Certificate
Check: Is your certificate valid and not expiring within 30 days?
What to look for:
- Browser shows the padlock (no "Not Secure" warning)
- Certificate issued to the correct domain (including
wwwif applicable) - Valid to date is more than 30 days away
- Certificate chain is complete (no intermediate cert issues)
How often: Monthly check is the minimum. Automated monitoring is better — certificate issues can appear suddenly if an auto-renewal fails.
3. Broken Links
Check: Do all internal and external links on your key pages resolve successfully?
What to look for:
- No 404 responses on linked pages
- No links still pointing to
http://(insecure) - No links to deprecated or discontinued third-party resources
- Product/pricing/CTA links working correctly
How often: Monthly for a crawl of the full site. Immediately after any site restructure or CMS migration.
4. SEO Basics
Check: Do your important pages have the metadata search engines need?
What to look for:
- Each page has a unique
<title>tag (50–60 characters) - Each page has a meta description (120–160 characters)
- One H1 per page, containing relevant keywords
<link rel="canonical">present to prevent duplicate content- Images have alt text
- No duplicate titles or descriptions across pages
How often: After any content or template changes. Monthly audit of top pages.
5. Console Errors
Check: Does your site load without JavaScript errors in the browser console?
What to look for:
- No
Failed to load resourceerrors (missing scripts, images, fonts) - No uncaught JavaScript exceptions
- No CORS errors from third-party requests
- No 404s on critical assets (fonts, stylesheets)
Console errors are invisible to users but can silently break functionality — a broken analytics script, a form that doesn't submit, a chat widget that won't load.
How often: After every deployment. Monthly check on production.
6. Core Web Vitals / Performance
Check: Does your site load fast enough that users don't abandon it?
What to look for:
- Time to first meaningful paint under 2.5 seconds
- No render-blocking resources
- Images appropriately sized and compressed
- No excessive third-party scripts slowing load time
How often: After major changes to page structure, images, or third-party scripts.
7. Forms and Key User Flows
Check: Does your contact form, signup form, or checkout actually work end-to-end?
What to look for:
- Form submits successfully
- Confirmation email arrives
- Payment flow completes without errors
- Auth flow (login/signup) works
This is the one category a simple health check can't fully automate — it requires actual user-like interaction with the page.
Doing This Manually vs. Automatically
Running through this checklist manually once a month is dramatically better than not doing it at all. But there are two problems with a manual approach:
Frequency — a monthly check leaves a 30-day window where something could be broken. SSL certs expire, links go dead, and deploys introduce bugs between checks.
Recency — the most dangerous issues appear right after a change. A bad deploy, a CDN misconfiguration, a dependency that updated unexpectedly. Manual monthly checks aren't timed to catch post-deploy regressions.
Page Canary automates the SSL, broken link and JavaScript error checks on this list and runs them every day, and walks your main flow (booking, contact form or checkout) like a customer every week. When something changes (a cert starts expiring, a link breaks, a console error appears) you get an email.
Run a free scan of your site now to see where you stand.