A read-only health check looks at your website the way a visitor or a search engine does: from the outside. It never logs in and never changes anything. That limits what it can see, and it's also why it's safe to run every day.
What it can catch
- The site being down, or slow to respond.
- An SSL certificate or domain that's about to expire.
- Pages that suddenly return errors or redirect somewhere odd.
- Quiet SEO changes, like a page that picked up a "noindex" tag or a new canonical.
- Missing security headers.
What it can't
- Problems behind a login, like a broken checkout step.
- Whether your backups work.
- Outdated plugins, unless they show themselves on the public page.
- Anything about the quality of your content.
Why read-only is a feature
A tool that needs your passwords or a plugin can also break things, and it's one more thing to trust. A check that only looks can't hurt the site. It just tells you, in plain words, when something changed.
That's the idea behind Site Health Club (opens in a new tab) (and its Spanish twin, Sitio Sano (opens in a new tab)), which is coming soon.
Written with AI help and checked by Mogens. How we use AI.