Running a Website Check Yourself, Tool by Tool

Chrome flags a website in red the moment its SSL certificate expires — before the homepage even loads. So a self-run website check doesn't start with search rankings. It starts with whether the site looks trustworthy at all. The nine steps below are the order a check actually happens in, not the order a checklist would print them.

1. Check the certificate and encryption

The SSL test from Qualys SSL Labs is free and only needs the domain, no sign-up required. It returns a grade from A to F, plus a list of outdated protocols or certificate chains that never show up in the browser's padlock icon. Skip this step and you're trusting the padlock alone — which only confirms that encryption exists, not that the configuration is current.

2. Open Google Search Console

Search Console is free but requires a one-time verification via DNS record or HTML tag. The page indexing report shows how many subpages are actually in the index and why some got excluded. Without this step, nobody notices when an important page hasn't been crawled in months — it still exists, it just stopped showing up in search.

3. Read the Core Web Vitals in PageSpeed Insights

At pagespeed.web.dev a URL is all it takes; the tool is free and returns separate scores for mobile and desktop. The overall number matters less than the three Core Web Vitals underneath it: loading time of the largest element, layout shift, responsiveness to input. Fixating on the score alone tends to optimise the wrong thing — a piece on vistem.eu describes the same pattern in production processes: a single metric that looks good in isolation can harm the whole system once it's optimised on its own.

4. Check load time with the actual resources involved

GTmetrix shows a waterfall chart in its free tier: which file takes how long, which image is blocking the page. Unlike PageSpeed Insights, this view makes it obvious when a single 4 MB background image is the real bottleneck. The free tier drops scheduled retests and the choice of test server location — for a one-off check that's not a real limitation.

5. Simulate the mobile view in Chrome DevTools

Right-click the page, choose "Inspect," then toggle device view. Testing only one standard device misses what happens at 360 pixels wide (a small phone) or 1440 pixels (a tablet in landscape). A menu that looks fine at 375 pixels sometimes stops opening correctly at 360. The simulator has its own limit, too: it won't replicate the stutter a real phone shows on a weak mobile connection, so a quick check on an actual handset outside the office Wi-Fi is worth the extra five minutes. This step alone almost always turns up at least one element that behaves differently on a real phone than on a monitor.

6. Trigger the contact form and phone link yourself

Send a test message through the own contact form and check whether it arrives — including the spam folder. On a phone, tap the tel: link and confirm it actually dials. Forms that have been failing silently since a server move usually only surface once a customer wonders why nobody called back. Businesses that route calls through a booking tool instead run into a related issue — less about dead forms, more about whether customers still need to pick up the phone at all, as covered in the piece on booking tools for small businesses.

7. Match the Google Business Profile against the website

Address, opening hours and phone number on the Google Business Profile need to match what's in the website footer. A phone number that's a digit off after an office move or provider switch looks harmless — until a customer sees both sources side by side and isn't sure which one to trust.

8. Click through the internal links

On small sites, clicking through the main navigation and the key subpages by hand is enough. Larger sites can hand that off to the free W3C Link Checker, page by page, without a visual overview. Dead links rarely come from typing mistakes — they come from subpages that got renamed or deleted later while something else kept linking to the old address.

9. Compare the results against the last round

A single measurement without a baseline is just a snapshot. What exactly belongs in that comparison is laid out in more detail in the checklist for a technical website check; what a quarterly repeat actually costs in owner time is worked through in the 275 euros a year in own time breakdown.

The shortcut: an automated check from outside

Anyone who'd rather not click through nine steps can run the free website check from Log-System Development, which bundles speed, basic SEO signals and a few of the points above into a single pass. It doesn't replace every step — testing forms and matching the Business Profile stay manual work — but it covers the technical side faster than pulling results out of five separate tools. Log-System Development describes its core business this way: building websites designed to bring in inquiries, wiring in AI features, and developing apps directly with developers, without an agency sitting between client and code. For a business that's already planning a relaunch once the check comes back, that's a single point of contact instead of a chain of subcontractors. For a business whose site just needs two or three small fixes, going through the existing CMS is usually the cheaper route.

Where this usually goes wrong

The most common mistake isn't a skipped step but a wrong conclusion drawn from a right one: a red PageSpeed result gets read as an SEO problem, even though load time and findability are separate issues. Just as common: a clean SSL grade gets treated as proof that "the site is fine," when the SSL test says nothing about content, indexing or forms. Looking at the nine steps on their own terms, rather than letting one score explain another, usually finds the actual cause faster.