Guide
Website Health Audit Guide
Review a website’s health layer by layer: availability, redirects, DNS, HTTPS and security headers, email authentication and content, with a baseline you can compare against later.
Website health problems rarely announce themselves. A certificate quietly expires, a DNS record is changed by the wrong person, email starts landing in spam. This guide walks through each layer of a site in turn and ends with a baseline you can compare against the next time something goes wrong.
1. Build a short list of critical URLs
Pick 20 to 50 URLs that would hurt most if they broke: the homepage, signup, login, checkout, pricing, top landing pages and any API endpoints customers use. This list is the backbone of every later check.
2. Check availability and redirects
Run the list through a URL checker and record the status, response time and redirect path of each. Try the variations people type too: with and without www, with http:// instead of https://. Each should reach the right page in one hop.
3. Check DNS
Look up the domain’s A, AAAA, CNAME, MX and TXT records and confirm they match what your hosting and email providers expect. Compare the answers from several public resolvers; disagreement long after a change points to a stale or conflicting record.
4. Check HTTPS and security headers
Confirm that HTTP redirects to HTTPS everywhere and that the certificate covers every hostname you use. Then review the security headers: Strict-Transport-Security, Content-Security-Policy, and cookie flags on any session cookies. Missing headers are common and usually simple to add at the server or CDN.
5. Check email authentication
If the domain sends email, check SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Problems here don’t show up on the website at all, but they decide whether password resets, invoices and newsletters reach the inbox.
6. Save a baseline and repeat
Export the results and keep them with the date. Re-run the critical URL list after every release and the full review every few months. When something breaks, comparing with the baseline shows what changed.