How do I know if my website is technically healthy?

A technically healthy website is one that search engines can find, crawl, and understand without difficulty – and that loads quickly and reliably for the people visiting it. Most small business websites have at least one technical issue that is quietly affecting their search visibility or user experience, often without the business owner being aware of it.

The most reliable way to check your website’s technical health is to run it through Google Search Console – which is free and provides direct data from Google about how it sees and indexes your site – and a technical SEO audit tool such as Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or Semrush. These tools will surface issues including broken links, missing or duplicate meta descriptions and title tags, pages that are blocked from being crawled, slow-loading pages, missing alt text on images, and redirect errors.

Key things to check manually include whether your site loads in under three seconds on a mobile device – you can test this using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool – whether you have an SSL certificate installed so your site loads on HTTPS rather than HTTP, whether your sitemap has been submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and whether your robots.txt file is correctly configured and not accidentally blocking search engines from important pages.

From a structural perspective, every page should have a unique title tag and meta description, your heading hierarchy should be logical – one H1 per page, followed by H2 and H3 subheadings in order – and your internal linking should help both users and search engines navigate between related content.

FreshPour’s BCS Level 4 Full Stack Developer qualification means technical website issues are approached with a genuine understanding of how they arise and how to fix them – not just an ability to read an audit report and repeat what it says.