A website is not a poster you hang once and forget. It is a live system, and live systems drift, break, and get attacked quietly. A monthly website health check catches the silent failures — the ones that do not throw an error but slowly cost you rankings and revenue. Here is the checklist we run.
Indexing and crawling
- Index coverage — has your indexed page count dropped? In Search Console, a sudden fall in indexed pages is an early warning.
- Crawl errors — check Crawl Stats for spikes in 404s and 5xx responses. Googlebot getting errors wastes crawl budget and can pull down rankings.
- Sitemap status — confirm your sitemap still returns 200, still lists the right URLs, and shows no errors.
Performance
- Page speed / Core Web Vitals — run a real Lighthouse test. Speed regressions creep in with every new plugin, script, or image.
- Uptime — review any downtime in the last month. Repeated outages during crawl windows hurt.
- Mobile rendering — Google indexes mobile-first; check that the mobile version renders fully.
Security
- SSL certificate — confirm it is valid and not about to expire. We once found a certificate 13 days from expiry that a renewal misconfiguration would have let lapse silently.
- Software updates — CMS, plugins, and dependencies patched.
- Suspicious traffic — scan logs for scrapers and bots hammering your site, and verify any "Googlebot" by IP, not user agent (here is why).
- Search Console security & manual actions — both should read "no issues".
Traffic and rankings
- Organic traffic trend — compare this month to last. A gradual decline is easy to miss month-to-month but obvious over a quarter.
- Top queries and positions — are your money terms holding, rising, or slipping?
- Pages losing traffic — identify pages that dropped so you can investigate before the loss compounds.
Why monthly, and why it is worth outsourcing
Most of these failures are invisible from the front end — your site looks fine while its search visibility quietly erodes. A monthly rhythm catches drift while it is still cheap to fix. This is precisely the thinking behind our subscription website audits: a continuous, measured health check instead of a one-off snapshot. If you would rather have it done for you and delivered as a clear pass/attention/fail report, that is what we do.
