Guides

How to check your website's health

Most small business owners only find out their website has a problem when something goes wrong. Enquiries dry up, an email to a customer lands in spam, or someone mentions the site looked broken on their phone.

A website health check is a way of finding those problems first. You don't need to be technical to run one or to understand the results. This guide covers the eight things worth checking, what a good result looks like, and how to test each one for free.

What a website health check looks at

A proper check covers two kinds of thing. Four are scored out of 100. Four are simple pass or fail.

The four scores

1. Performance. How quickly your pages load and respond, especially on a phone over a mobile connection. Slow pages lose visitors before they have read a word, and Google takes speed into account.

2. Accessibility. Whether people can use the site if they have poor eyesight, use a keyboard instead of a mouse, or rely on a screen reader. Common faults are pale text on a pale background, buttons with no label, and images with no description.

3. Best practices. A general measure of whether the site is built soundly: no errors behind the scenes, images shown at a sensible size, nothing out of date or unsafe.

4. Search visibility. Whether search engines can read and understand your pages. This covers the basics, such as each page having a clear title and description. It does not tell you where you rank. It tells you whether anything is standing in the way.

A simple way to read the scores: 80 or above is good, 50 to 79 is average, and below 50 is poor. Judge the site by its weakest score, not the average. A fast site that search engines can't read is still a site with a problem.

The four pass-or-fail checks

5. A secure connection. Your address should begin with https and show a padlock. Without it, browsers warn visitors that the site is not secure, and most will leave.

6. Security headers. These are settings your site sends to a visitor's browser telling it how to behave safely, for example refusing to let another site display yours inside a hidden frame. Visitors never see them. Many small business sites have none set, usually because nobody was asked to add them.

7. Email authentication. Three records, known as SPF, DKIM and DMARC, prove that email sent from your business address really comes from you. Without them, your quotes and invoices are more likely to land in spam, and it is easier for a fraudster to send email that appears to come from your business. This lives with your domain, not your website, which is why it so often gets missed.

8. Legal basics. In the UK that means a privacy policy, a cookie banner if your site uses tracking or advertising cookies, and your company details if you trade as a limited company.

How to test your own site for free

The quickest route is to run all eight at once. Our free website health check does that. You enter your website address, and it usually finishes in under two minutes. You get the four scores, a plain-English summary and the one thing to fix first. There is no account and no card, and you only give an email address if you want the full report sent to you.

Checking these one at a time is possible, but it means finding and learning a separate specialist tool for speed, another for security settings, another for email records, and so on, then making sense of results that each use their own language. A health check brings those tests together in one place and reports them in plain English, which is the reason to use one.

The legal basics are the exception, because they need a human eye. Open your site in a private browser window and look for the cookie banner, the privacy policy link and your company details in the footer.

What to do with the results

Don't try to fix everything at once. Work in this order:

1. Anything that fails a pass-or-fail check. A missing secure connection or missing email records can cost you customers today.
2. Your weakest score. That is where the biggest improvement is.
3. Everything else, a little at a time.

Some fixes are quick. Adding email records is often a fifteen-minute job for whoever manages your domain. Others depend on how your site was built. Speed problems on a site made with a page builder can be hard to fix without rebuilding parts of it. If you have a web designer, send them the results and ask what they can change.

Check again, not just once

Websites drift. A new plugin slows things down, a certificate expires, or someone adds a tracking tool without updating the cookie banner. Run a check every few months, and always after a significant change to the site.

A health check will not tell you whether your website wins you business. It tells you whether anything is quietly getting in the way.

Naira Digital Growth builds and looks after websites for small businesses in Oxfordshire. The free website health check is open to any UK business.