How to Check If Your Website Is Healthy

What "website health" actually means

"Is my website healthy?" is a question more people should be asking. But it's also vague — what does "healthy" even mean for a website?

Think of it like a car inspection. You check the engine, brakes, tires, lights, and emissions. For a website, the equivalent checks are:

• Speed — how fast does it load?
• Security — is it safe for visitors?
• SEO readiness — can Google find and rank it properly?
• Uptime — is it actually online?
• SSL validity — is the connection encrypted?
• Mobile rendering — does it work on phones?

A website can look perfectly normal and still be failing on multiple counts. The problems are invisible to visitors (at first) but very visible to Google and slowly chipping away at your traffic and conversions.

Check 1: Speed

This is the most impactful and easiest to test.

Tool: Google PageSpeed Insights

Enter your URL. You'll get a score from 0–100 and detailed metrics. Focus on the mobile score — that's what Google uses for ranking.

What to look for:

• Score above 70: You're in decent shape. Room to improve, but not critical.
• Score 50–70: Problems are building up. Your site is noticeably slow on mobile.
• Score below 50: Something is seriously wrong. You're losing visitors and search ranking.

The most common culprits for low scores: unoptimized images, too many plugins loading JavaScript, no caching, and outdated PHP. We cover these in detail in our website speed article.

Bonus tool: GTmetrix — shows a waterfall chart of everything that loads and how long each resource takes. Useful for identifying specific bottlenecks.

Check 2: Security

Security problems can be completely invisible until Google flags your site or a customer reports something strange.

Tool: Google Safe Browsing

Enter your domain. If the status is "No unsafe content found," you're clear. If it shows warnings, your site may be distributing malware or hosting phishing content — even if you don't see it yourself.

Tool: Sucuri SiteCheck

A free scanner that checks for malware, blacklisting, errors, and outdated software. It's not 100% comprehensive (it can only check what's publicly visible), but it catches common issues.

What to look for:

• Any malware warnings or blacklisting
• Outdated WordPress core version
• Outdated plugin versions with known vulnerabilities
• Missing security headers

For a complete security audit, see our WordPress security checklist.

Check 3: SSL certificate

Your SSL certificate encrypts the connection between visitors and your site. If it's expired or misconfigured, visitors see scary browser warnings and Google penalizes your ranking.

Tool: SSL Labs Server Test

Enter your domain. You want an A or A+ rating. Anything lower indicates configuration issues.

What to check:

• Certificate validity: When does it expire? Is auto-renewal working?
• Chain of trust: Is the full certificate chain properly installed?
• Protocol support: Is TLS 1.2+ enabled? (Older protocols are insecure.)
• No mixed content: All resources (images, scripts, styles) should load over HTTPS.

Mixed content — where your page loads over HTTPS but some images or scripts still use HTTP — is surprisingly common and breaks the padlock icon in browsers.

Check 4: Mobile friendliness

More than half of all web traffic is mobile. Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning the mobile version of your site is what gets ranked.

How to check: Open your site on your phone. Actually use it. Try to:

• Read the text without zooming
• Click buttons and links without accidentally hitting the wrong one
• Fill out a contact form
• Navigate the menu
• Scroll through the entire page

Then check the Mobile Usability report in Google Search Console (you'll need to have your site verified there).

Common issues:

• Text too small to read
• Clickable elements too close together
• Content wider than the screen (horizontal scrolling)
• Pop-ups covering content (Google explicitly penalizes "intrusive interstitials")

Check 5: SEO basics

You don't need to be an SEO expert. But there are basic things that should be in place.

Tool: Google Search Console

If you haven't set this up, do it now. It's free, it's from Google, and it tells you exactly how Google sees your site.

Key things to check:

• Coverage report: How many of your pages are indexed? Are there errors preventing pages from being indexed?
• Sitemap: Is your sitemap submitted and processed? Does it list all your important pages?
• Core Web Vitals report: Are your pages passing Google's speed and usability metrics?
• Security issues: Any warnings about malware or hacked content?

Also do a quick manual check:

• Search site:yourdomain.com on Google. Do all your important pages appear?
• Are there pages showing that you didn't create? (Sign of a hack.)
• Do your page titles and descriptions look correct in the search results?

For more detail on what Google checks, read 5 Things Google Checks That Your Developer Never Told You.

Check 6: Uptime

Is your site actually online? You'd be surprised how many sites experience regular downtime that the owner never notices.

Tools:

• UptimeRobot (free tier monitors every 5 minutes)
• Better Stack (free tier with incident management)

Set up monitoring for your site's main URL. You'll get notified when it goes down and when it comes back up. Over time, you'll see patterns — maybe your site goes down every night at 3 AM (cron jobs overloading the server), or every time traffic spikes (hosting can't handle the load).

If your uptime is below 99.9%, something needs attention. That 0.1% might not sound like much, but it equals about 8 hours of downtime per year.

Check 7: Software versions

This one requires WordPress admin access. Log into your dashboard and check:

• WordPress core version: Is it the latest? (Check at wordpress.org)
• PHP version: Is it PHP 8.1 or higher? (Check in Tools → Site Health)
• Plugin updates: How many are waiting? Any marked as incompatible?
• Theme updates: Is your theme up to date?
• WordPress Site Health: Go to Tools → Site Health in your dashboard. WordPress runs its own diagnostics here.

If your WordPress dashboard shows 15+ pending updates, you're in the danger zone. The longer you wait, the riskier updating becomes — because multiple updates at once are more likely to conflict. This is the exact scenario we describe in The WordPress Paradox.

Making it a habit

Checking your website's health isn't a one-time thing. Like a car, it needs regular inspection. The questions is: do you want to do it yourself, or let someone handle it?

If you want to do it yourself, bookmark these tools and set a monthly reminder. 30 minutes once a month can prevent thousands of kroner in emergency fixes.

If you'd rather not think about it, that's what WPulse is for. We handle the maintenance side — monthly updates, backups, and health verification — so the technical foundation stays solid. You can focus the 30 minutes on actually using your website to grow your business.