How to check your website still works
Loading is not working. The failures that cost money happen one step inside, where nothing shows from the outside.
Check what fails silently. Send your own contact form. Read the certificate expiry. Look up whose name the domain is in. Restore a backup. Under an hour, and it covers most of what goes wrong.
Is it a fit?
Form
Send your own contact form and watch for it. This is where most sites fail quietly.
Expiry
The certificate and the domain have dates, and somebody is watching them.
Restore
A backup exists and has been restored once, which is the only proof it works.
Start here. You get back a short list of what nobody is watching, in the order it is likely to bite.
Find the weak pointWork it out in a minute
Eight questions naming the one unattended thing most likely to cost you, from the form that stopped sending to the domain nobody can prove they own.
The plan
Do these five, in order
A time against each one and a way to tell it is finished.
Send your own form
Every page that has one, then wait for the email.
20 minutes · Done when each submission arrives in an inbox you read
Read the certificate expiry
Open the padlock and look at the date.
10 minutes · Done when the renewal date is in a calendar with an owner
Look up your own domain
Expiry, registrant, and which address the notices go to.
10 minutes · Done when auto-renew is on and the contact address is one you read
Restore a backup somewhere else
A backup nobody has restored is a file, not a backup.
1 hour · Done when the copy loads on a staging address
Put the four in the calendar
Quarterly, same day, one owner.
15 minutes · Done when the next four dates exist
What you get
Send your own form
From a phone, on mobile data rather than the office network, and check the email arrives somewhere a person reads.
Look at the certificate expiry
Click the padlock and read the date.
Look up your own domain
A public WHOIS lookup shows the registrant and the expiry.
Restore a backup somewhere
Anywhere.
Why the obvious check is the wrong one
The check everybody makes is loading the home page, and that is the one thing that almost never fails. Hosting is reliable now, and when a site does go down it tends to come back quickly and somebody notices. The failures that persist are the ones that leave the page looking exactly as it did yesterday.
Certificates changed quietly this year and it is worth knowing about. The maximum lifetime used to be over a year, which made renewal an annual thing somebody remembered. It became 200 days in March, becomes 100 days in 2027, and 47 days in 2029. Anything on automatic renewal is fine. Anything renewed by hand has become a recurring job that nobody has scheduled yet, and a lapsed certificate puts a full page browser warning in front of your site.
Enough failures in one place and the answer is a redesign rather than another patch.
The eight question checker on our website maintenance page scores these in about a minute and names the one most likely to hurt you first, which is rarely the one people expect.
Questions we get
How often should any of this be checked?
The form monthly, because it is the one that costs money and the one that fails most often. The rest quarterly is fine.
Domain and certificate expiry can be watched automatically rather than remembered, which is the better answer for anything with a date on it.
My form uses a third party service. Is it still worth testing?
Yes, and arguably more so. There are more places for the message to stop.
The submission can succeed at the service and still fail to reach you, because delivery to your inbox is a separate step with its own ways of going wrong. Test the whole path, ending at the inbox a human opens.
How do I look up a domain?
Any public WHOIS lookup, including the ones registrars run for free. Search for your own domain and read the registrant organization and the expiry date.
If privacy protection is on you will see the proxy rather than your name, which is normal. In that case the answer is in the registrar account, and if nobody knows which registrar it is, that is itself the finding.
What if nothing has gone wrong in years?
Then you have been lucky and probably well set up, and the checks will take twenty minutes and confirm it.
The one worth doing regardless is the form. It is the item on this list that fails most often, costs the most when it does, and takes the least time to test.
More in the guides and every answer in one place.
Most of this is doable in house.
Read next
Who watches it when you are not looking, what to do when the platform is the problem, and whether the site still earns.
Shaheer leads the work, with engineers, writers, filers and analysts behind him. C-suite operations for a San Francisco AI company, Six Sigma on the process side, Anthropic certified on the Model Context Protocol, ten years across eight industries. See what we have built