7 Site Health Checks to Run Regularly
Websites accumulate problems the same way garages do. Nothing dramatic happens. You just keep adding stuff, stop throwing things out, and one day you realize it's a mess and you're not sure when it got that way.
Most site health issues aren't caused by bad decisions. They're caused by inattention. Here are seven things worth checking on a regular basis.
1. Broken internal links
When pages get renamed, moved, or deleted, the links pointing to them don't update automatically. They just break. Over time you end up with links that go nowhere, which is frustrating for visitors and a mild annoyance for search engines.
Run a crawl (Screaming Frog is free up to 500 URLs, and Google Search Console will show you some of this too), find the broken links, and update them. If the destination page no longer exists, either remove the link or point it somewhere relevant.
2. Redirect chains
A redirect is supposed to be a bridge from an old URL to a new one. The problem is they stack up. Page A redirects to Page B, which was later renamed to Page C, which redirects to Page D. Now you've got a chain four hops long and nobody's cleaned it up.
Redirect chains slow down load times and dilute link equity, because each hop in the chain loses a little of the authority being passed along. The fix is to update your internal links to point directly to the final destination URL, cutting out the middlemen.
3. Orphaned pages
An orphaned page is one that exists on your site but isn't linked from anywhere. No navigation, no blog post, no footer link. It's just floating.
Search engines rely on internal links to discover pages. Without them, orphaned pages often go unindexed, meaning they can't rank for anything regardless of how good the content is. To find them, compare your sitemap against what a crawler actually finds by following links. Pages in one list but not the other are your orphans.
4. Outdated content
Service pages that describe offerings you no longer have. Blog posts that recommend tools you stopped using. Pricing that changed two years ago. This stuff erodes trust quietly, because a visitor has no way of knowing whether anything else on your site is accurate.
A quick review of your most-visited pages every few months goes a long way. Update what's changed, merge things that overlap, and don't be afraid to just delete pages that no longer make sense.
5. Page performance
You don't need a lightning-fast site. You need one that doesn't feel sluggish. Most performance problems come from images that were uploaded at full resolution and never compressed, or scripts from old tools that are still loading even though you stopped using the tool.
Google's PageSpeed Insights will show you where the weight is. Start with images, since that's usually where the most gain is, and work from there.
6. Unnecessary complexity
This one's harder to see because it builds slowly. A plugin gets added. Then another one that does something similar. Custom configurations accumulate. Nobody documents any of it. Then one day someone tries to make a small change and it feels risky because nobody's sure what might break.
Simpler sites are easier to maintain and easier to fix when something goes wrong. Every few months it's worth asking: is there anything here we're not using anymore?
7. Paying regular attention
The common thread through all of these is that they get bad when nobody's looking. A quick check every month or two catches most of this stuff before it compounds into something bigger.
Further reading: Google's own documentation on how crawling and indexing works is worth a read if you want to understand why these things matter mechanically.
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