Website check online: what one minute of scanning reveals

An online website check in about a minute: which areas it covers, what the report looks like, how to read the first screen and when the check is worth running.

Infrastructure · Published: 15 October 2026 · 7 min read · Дмитрий Орлов

An online website check is the cheapest way to find out what state a site is in right now: no server access, no tracking snippet to install, no contractor to brief. You type an address and about a minute later you see what a visitor, a search crawler and a browser see — which pages answer with an error, when the certificate runs out, what is missing from the headers and the meta tags. Here is what that minute actually covers, what the result looks like, and when it is worth running.

What happens while you wait

The scanner starts from the address you entered. The home page is opened in a real browser, so JavaScript gets to run and a bot-check page in front of the site gets to finish. Then the crawler follows internal links and the sitemap and reads a few more pages. A free SiteScan check reads five pages by default and ten at most — enough to cover the templates (home, category, product, article, contact), and a mistake in a template repeats on every page built from it.

Alongside the pages run the checks that belong to the domain rather than to any single page: certificate, domain registration, DNS, robots.txt, sitemap.xml, redirects and response headers. The help centre describes the crawl in detail.

What gets checked

List the areas and you have most of what tends to break on a live site:

• Links and server responses. Broken internal links, pages answering 4xx or 5xx, redirect chains, and soft 404s — a missing address that answers 200 OK. See the article on broken links.
• SEO groundwork. Title, description, H1, canonical, hreflang, structured data, robots.txt and the sitemap. noindex gets its own treatment: deliberate on the cart and the account pages, a mistake on a product page.
• Speed. HTML and image weight, compression, static-file caching, HTTP/2, slow server responses — plus Core Web Vitals for the home page from PageSpeed Insights, where LCP under 2.5 s, CLS under 0.1 and INP under 200 ms count as good.
• Security. TLS certificate expiry and chain, the http-to-https redirect, HSTS, CSP and the other headers, and files that should never be public: .env, .git, database dumps.
• Console and markup. JavaScript errors logged while the browser had the page open, and HTML validity errors.
• Accessibility and mobile. Alt text, form labels, tap target sizes, and whether the menu works from a keyboard on a phone-sized screen.
• Mail and privacy. MX, SPF, DMARC, trackers, the cookie consent layer and links to the privacy policy.

The full list of analysers is on the product page.

What the result looks like

The report opens with an overall score from 0 to 100 and a score per category: 90 and up is excellent, 70–89 good, below 70 needs work. The overall figure is the average of the measured categories, so one failing area cannot hide behind eight healthy ones.

Underneath sits a short block for the site owner — the three most dangerous problems, how many pages each touches and what fixing it gives you. Then come the quick wins, every finding with its severity (critical, high, medium, low), the site-level checks, and a table of pages with everything the crawler read on them. The same problem on nine pages is one item with nine addresses, not nine rows. How to read all this and decide what to fix first is the subject of website analysis online.

The report has a permanent address, so you can send it to a colleague, print it or save it as a PDF. Finished reports also appear in the public list of recent scans.

When to run it

A single check is a snapshot, and snapshots are most useful at particular moments:

1. Before and after a release. The first shows what you are shipping on top of; the second whether the deploy broke anything.
2. After a migration. New hosting, a new CMS, a new domain or the move to HTTPS — the classic sources of lost redirects and a forgotten Disallow: /.
3. When something feels off. Traffic dropped, mail lands in spam, the browser complains about the certificate — a one-minute check narrows the list of suspects.
4. Once a month as hygiene, for a site that changes slowly. Certificates and domains expire quietly; see expiry dates.

What an online check will not do

An automated scanner sees what can be measured from the outside. It will not tell you whether your copy persuades or whether someone with a screen reader can finish an order — a good share of accessibility barriers still needs a person. Pages behind a login and addresses nothing links to stay out of the report. A clean report means "nothing measurable is broken", not "the site is perfect". If you need a repeatable process with a plan, tickets and re-checks, that is a website audit, not a one-off measurement.

How to check a site with SiteScan

1. Open the home page and paste the address, with or without https://.
2. Wait about a minute. If every slot is busy, the scan starts on its own from the queue.
3. Read the owner summary and the quick wins first, then open the categories with the lowest scores.
4. Fix, deploy and press Rescan: a saved report is reused for fifteen minutes, and the button forces a fresh crawl.

No sign-up is needed for the free check. For more pages per scan or the deeper audit types, see pricing.