What free website checkers miss, and what we check on every site we look after

Free website checkers look at one page. Put in your address, get a score, get told your images are too big. That's useful, but most of what goes wrong with a small business website is spread across pages, or isn't on a page at all.

So we built our own check, and pointed it at our own website first.

What it looks at

Across the whole site, it visits every page it can reach, the way Google does, and looks for:

• the same site answering on several addresses (with and without www, http and https), which splits what Google thinks of you
• two addresses showing the same page
• pages that don't say which address is the real one (the "canonical")
• page titles and descriptions too long to show in search results
• pages whose title says one thing and whose heading says another
• pages with so little on them that Google won't bother
• broken links, and redirects that bounce more than once
• pages missing from the sitemap, the list you give Google of what's there

Away from the pages, it checks the things nobody sees until they go wrong:

• whether your email is set up so other people can't send mail pretending to be you (SPF, DKIM and DMARC)
• your security certificate: valid, complete, and when it runs out
• that old, weak versions of the secure connection are switched off
• the security settings your server sends with every page

Every finding comes with the evidence, and the next run checks whether it's been fixed.

What it found on ours

The first run looked at 75 pages in 45 seconds. Nothing was broken, but 24 page descriptions and 24 titles were too long to show in full on Google. We shortened them that evening and the next run moved our grade from B to A.

It also found one real error, in our own email settings. That caps our security grade at C until it's fixed, however good everything else is. It's on our list.

What it does for clients

Every site we look after gets checked, and any error becomes a job on our board the same day rather than an item in a report nobody reads. On our care plans you also get the results each month as plain counts.

Care plans · Website security