"Health" is a moving target, not a single score
A one-time audit tells you how your site looks today. Website health is really about whether that status holds up over time — pages that were indexed last month can silently drop out, and Core Web Vitals scores shift with traffic, server load, and third-party scripts you didn't touch. Checking health means building a routine, not running a single scan.
The core signals worth tracking
- Indexation status — check Google Search Console's Page Indexing report for pages marked "Crawled, not indexed" or "Discovered, not indexed." A rising count here is often the first sign of a bigger problem, sometimes before it shows up in traffic.
- Core Web Vitals — Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and interactivity scores. These fluctuate; track trend lines rather than reacting to a single bad reading.
- Mobile usability — Google indexes the mobile version of your site by default, so rendering issues there directly affect indexing and ranking, even if the desktop version looks fine.
- Crawl errors — 404s, server errors, and blocked resources that show up in Search Console's crawl stats.
- Sitemap vs. index mismatch — pages in your sitemap that Google hasn't indexed, or indexed pages missing from your sitemap, both signal something worth investigating.
Building a repeatable check, not a one-off scan
- Set a recurring monthly check for indexation and crawl errors — most of these issues are silent until they've already cost you a chunk of organic traffic
- Track Core Web Vitals as a trend over weeks, not a single snapshot; a single slow reading during a traffic spike isn't the same as a sustained regression
- Re-check your sitemap against actual indexed pages after any CMS update, plugin change, or redesign — these are the most common causes of sudden indexation drops
- Isolate changes where possible: if you update five things on your site at once, a health check won't tell you which change caused which effect
What tends to get missed
- JavaScript-rendered content — if critical content loads via JS, some crawlers may not see what a browser renders; verify with Search Console's URL inspection tool, not just a third-party crawler
- Third-party script bloat — a new marketing pixel or chat widget can quietly tank Core Web Vitals without anyone touching the page's actual content
- Robots.txt changes — a single misplaced disallow rule from a dev deploy can block an entire section without any visible symptom until indexation drops
Our sitemap generator and robots.txt checker are useful for catching the sitemap-mismatch and accidental-blocking issues specifically, since both tend to be silent failures otherwise.
Common misconceptions
- "If traffic looks fine, health is fine" — indexation and crawl issues often show up weeks before they visibly affect traffic; by the time rankings drop, the underlying issue has usually existed for a while
- "Core Web Vitals is a pass/fail gate" — it's one signal among many; a page can have mediocre Vitals and still outrank a technically faster page with better content
- "A health check is a one-time setup task" — sites change constantly through CMS updates, plugin changes, and content edits; health checks need to be recurring to catch regressions
Wrapping up
Checking website health for SEO means tracking indexation, Core Web Vitals, and crawl errors as ongoing trends, not running a single scan and calling it done. Set a recurring monthly check, isolate changes when something shifts, and treat silent failures — a blocked section, a JS rendering gap — as the ones most worth watching for.