How Healthy Is Your Website?

A website health check is a multi-dimensional inspection of whether a site is actually working — not just whether its server responds. It verifies availability and response codes, validates every linked asset (JS, CSS, images, fonts), checks SSL certificate and chain validity, inspects the redirect chain, and measures performance. Instead of a single "up" or "down" answer, it returns the specific failures so you know exactly what to fix.

Run an instant check: paste your URL into Sitewatch's free site scan (getsitewatch.com/scan) to see availability, asset integrity, SSL, and redirects in about 20 seconds with no signup. To know if your site is healthy over time, set up continuous monitoring so checks run on a schedule and after every deploy — a single point-in-time check only tells you about this moment.

A complete website health check includes five layers: (1) availability and response — status code and speed; (2) asset and rendering integrity — every script, stylesheet, image, and font loading with the correct status and MIME type; (3) SSL/TLS — certificate validity, full chain, and protocol/cipher strength; (4) redirect health — no loops or broken chains; and (5) performance. Sitewatch runs 20 detection rules across these dimensions.

Yes. Sitewatch offers two free instant tools with no signup: the site scan at getsitewatch.com/scan runs a full health check on any URL, and the Is My Website Down tool answers whether a site is up right now. For continuous automated health checks with alerting, the free plan covers 1 site at no cost.

Manually: after every deploy, plugin update, or configuration change — that's when most breakage happens. Automatically: the Free plan checks every 30 minutes (1 site), and paid plans go down to every 5 minutes. The single most important moment to check is immediately after pushing changes, which is why deploy hooks trigger an instant check on every release.

An uptime check asks "is the server responding?" A health check asks "is the website actually working?" Health checks validate every asset on the page — JS, CSS, images, third-party scripts — plus SSL and redirects, not just the server's HTTP status code. An uptime tool sees a 200 OK and reports green; a health check sees the broken bundle behind it.

Because uptime only measures whether the server returns a response. The server can return 200 OK while a JavaScript bundle 404s, a stylesheet is served with the wrong MIME type, a third-party script fails, or a redirect loops. The page "loads" but doesn't work. A health check inspects each of those layers, which is why it catches the failure your uptime monitor misses.

It should. Sitewatch continuously checks certificate validity (warning at 30 days, critical at 14), validates the full certificate chain including intermediates, and flags deprecated protocols (TLS 1.0/1.1) and weak ciphers. It also tracks domain expiry via RDAP. An expired certificate or broken chain blocks every visitor with a browser warning — so SSL is a core health dimension, not an add-on.

Yes — that's the core of a page-level health check. Sitewatch fetches your page and validates every linked asset (scripts, stylesheets, images, fonts) for HTTP status and MIME type on each check. When an asset 404s or is served with the wrong content type, you get an incident naming the exact URL and status code, not a vague "something is wrong."

No. Sitewatch checks your site externally over HTTP — the same way a browser does — so there's no plugin, agent, or server-side code to install, and zero performance impact on your site. Paste a URL into the free scan to check instantly, or add a site to start continuous monitoring. Setup takes about 60 seconds.

A passing instant check means availability and the assets checked were healthy from one location at one point in time. Health changes after the next deploy or cache expiry, and some issues (intermittent third-party failures, certificates expiring next month) only surface over time. For confidence that your site stays healthy, run continuous monitoring rather than relying on a single snapshot.

The Is My Website Down tool answers one urgent question: is this URL up or down right now? This health check is broader and proactive — it inspects availability, assets, SSL, and redirects across multiple dimensions and frames ongoing health. Same underlying technology, different intent: one is a quick status check, the other is a full diagnostic.

The Free plan monitors 1 site with scheduled health checks and alerting at no cost. Starter is $9/month for 25 sites, and Pro is $19/month for 100 sites. SSL and domain expiry monitoring are included on every plan, including Free. The instant scan and Is My Website Down tools are free for anyone with no account.