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Run a website sanity check

Keep abreast of technical problems on a website and maintain your rankings

What is a sanity check?

In SEO, a sanity check is a quick audit of a website’s health or performance to uncover any underlying issues that might affect the website’s SEO. Generally, sanity checks focus on technical elements such as page speed, server responses, and anything else that might regularly break on a website. This is a quick, inexpensive way to monitor a website and make sure that everything is functioning as it should.

To run a sanity check, the easiest thing to do is to crawl a website using an SEO crawler that will produce ready-to-use dashboards on issues like redirect chains and loops, broken links, server errors, slow pages… If your site is difficult to crawl, though, this might not be as straightforward as it sounds, or you might need an SEO crawler with more settings and flexibility. This is the case with pre-production sites, sites behind paywalls, some sites that rely heavily on JavaScript, or even certain sites that redirect visitors based on their IP address.

When a problem is detected, immediate access to the data behind the dashboard — including the URL where the issue is found — needs to be easily accessible, in order to make sure that things get fixed as quickly and easily as possible.

1000+ metrics

20+ dashboards

100% exportable

Is your website a good candidate for an SEO sanity check?

All professional websites and all websites that provide a service to users can benefit from regular sanity checks. Monitoring your website’s health ensures that it is always up and running, and that users are able to access the information, services, or products on the website.

Unsurprisingly, the same elements that can affect website health and performance for users also impact SEO: not only do search engine bots face the same problems as human users, but search engines increasingly use user experience and website performance data as part of their ranking algorithms, as is the case with Google Core Web Vitals and mobile-friendliness requirements.

Why use Oncrawl to run a sanity check on your website?

What do you need to run a sanity check?

Technical SEO Crawler

Program regular check-ups and check your website’s performance on all major technical SEO fronts. Easily compare two crawls to visualize the difference in key metrics.

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" Oncrawl is a tool that is complete, complex, and powerful. It allows us to get an overview of our site and to have a broad vision of all of the issues that an SEO might encounter. Oncrawl helps me save time, to be certain that the website is headed in the right direction, and that we won’t encounter technical regressions or other problems in production. "

Fabien Bougault Head of SEO at RegionsJob (HelloWork)

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