How to Check a Website for Technical Issues for Free

Most website problems are invisible from the outside. The homepage looks fine, so nobody notices that a page returns an error, that a redirect chain has grown to four hops, or that half the site has no description for search results.

A technical check answers that in one pass. It requests your page the way a browser or a search engine would, then reports what actually came back: the status code, where the address ended up, how long it took, what the page says about itself, and whether the two files search engines look for are there.

What a technical check looks at

There is a lot of advice about website health that comes down to a score out of 100. A score is not much use, because you cannot fix a score. What you can fix is a specific thing that is wrong, so a useful check reports facts rather than grades.

The Klyro check groups what it measures into three parts.

• How the page responds. The HTTP status code, whether the address ends up on HTTPS, how many redirects it goes through, the response time and the size of the HTML.
• What the page says about itself. The page title, the meta description, the canonical tag, the mobile viewport tag, the language attribute and the H1 heading.
• What search engines look for. Whether robots.txt exists and whether a sitemap is available at the usual address.

None of that is a guess. Each result is read from the response your server actually sent, at the moment the check ran.

How to check your website

1. 1

   Enter the address

   Type the page you want checked. A bare domain such as example.com works, and so does a full address with a path. If you leave the protocol off, the check tries HTTPS first.

2. 2

   Run the check

   Klyro requests the page from its own server, follows any redirects and reads the HTML that comes back. It takes a few seconds on most sites.

3. 3

   Work down the results

   Each line names a check, says whether it passed, and gives the value it found. Start at the top: response problems make everything below them harder to judge.

It is worth checking more than the homepage. Homepages get the most attention and are usually the healthiest page on a site. Run the check again on a product page, a blog post and a contact page, because those are where missing descriptions and stale redirects tend to collect.

How to read the results

Three labels appear beside the results, and they mean different things.

• Passed means the check found what it expected. Nothing to do.
• Warning means something is present but worth a look. A title of 72 characters is not broken; it will just be cut short in search results.
• Issue means something a visitor or a search engine relies on is missing or wrong. A missing meta description or a 404 status belongs here.

The one to read first is the HTTP status. 200 means the page was found and returned normally. Anything in the 400s means the page was not found or was refused, and anything in the 500s means the server itself had a problem. If the status is wrong, the rest of the report is describing an error page rather than your content.

Common problems and what they mean

• No meta description. Search engines will write their own snippet from the page text. It is usually worse than one you would write yourself, and it is the sentence people read before deciding whether to click.
• A title that is far too long. Anything past roughly 60 characters is likely to be trimmed. Put the useful words first.
• No mobile viewport tag. Without it, phones render the page at desktop width and shrink it. Text ends up unreadable without pinching.
• More than one H1, or none at all. One clear main heading per page tells both readers and search engines what the page is about.
• No sitemap. Not fatal, but a sitemap makes it much easier for a search engine to find pages that are not linked from your navigation.
• Redirects that stack up. Each hop costs time and each one is another thing that can break later.

If several results need attention, fix the response problems first, then the metadata, then the extras. There is no point polishing a page description on a page that returns an error.