How to inspect a website for health problems

To see what is wrong with a website right now, run one inspection across a sample of its pages and read the report. You want a list of defects with plain remedies, not a suite dashboard and not a month of setup.

What "health" means here

A healthy public site loads its pages, sends people to working URLs, and does not hide itself from search engines by accident. The usual failures are boring and expensive:

A menu or body link that 404s.
A page that returns 4xx or 5xx.
A redirect chain or loop.
Missing or duplicate titles and meta descriptions, or a messy H1.
A missing or broken robots.txt or sitemap.xml.
An invalid TLS certificate, mixed content, a stray noindex, or a conflicting canonical.

None of those needs a full SEO platform. They need a crawl and a readable report.

Hand-checking does not scale

Opening the homepage and clicking a few links finds the obvious ones. It misses the footer you forgot, the old campaign URL still in a template, the blog post with two H1s, and the HTTPS page still loading an HTTP image.

A spreadsheet of URLs you maintain by hand has the same problem. You check the pages you remember. The site has more pages than that.

Run one inspection

SiteCheck (opens in a new tab) takes the site URL, crawls up to the page limit for the plan, and stamps a report of what it found. Free: one-off report, up to 25 pages, no account, no card. Starter is $9/month or $90/year (1 site, 100 pages, weekly scans, email reports). Pro is $19/month or $190/year (5 sites, 500 pages each, daily scans, email alerts). Agency is $49/month or $490/year (25 sites, client-ready reports, CSV). Billing is via Creem.

The free scan is enough to see whether the site has a real mess or a short list. You do not create an account to run it.

What the report includes, check by check, is in what a website health report covers.

How to use the free scan

Pick the URL people actually visit. Prefer the canonical host (www or apex) that redirects correctly.
Run the free inspection. Wait for the report, not for a sales email.
Fix the defects that block visitors first: broken links, HTTP errors, redirect loops, mixed content, bad certificates.
Fix the SEO basics next: titles, descriptions, H1s, noindex, canonicals, robots.txt, sitemap.
If the site is one you look after every week, move to a paid plan for scheduled scans. If you only needed a cleanup list, stop at the free report.

Inspection is not the same as ongoing link alerts

An inspection answers "what is wrong on this crawl?" It will list old broken links and new ones together. That is correct for a cleanup day or a client handoff.

It is the wrong shape for a daily alert. If you already cleaned the site and only want to hear when a working link newly fails, that is Mortise (opens in a new tab): silent baseline, then alerts after a link fails twice as 404 or 410. The two jobs side by side are in website inspection vs new-break alerts.

What people do instead

Buy a desktop SEO suite for a one-afternoon cleanup. You get the list, and you also get a product you will not open again until the next launch.
Rely on Search Console alone. It shows some index and coverage issues. It does not walk your internal links the way a crawl does.
Wait for a customer to email "your contact page is broken." That is a monitor with a long delay and no report.

A free SiteCheck scan is the shorter path when you need the current defect list.

Checklist

The URL you entered is the live site visitors get.
You know whether you need a one-off cleanup list or a scheduled re-scan.
Broken links and HTTP errors are fixed before you polish titles.
Old known 404s you chose to leave are not turned into a daily email. Use Mortise after cleanup if you want regression alerts.
Free plan tried first: 25 pages is a real sample on a small site; larger sites need Starter or Pro for the fuller crawl.