The Complete Website Monitoring Checklist (2026)

Most website monitoring checklists fail the same way: they list thirty sensible checks, someone does them enthusiastically for two weeks, and then a busy Tuesday arrives and nobody ever opens the list again. The fix is not discipline. It is sorting every check by how often it needs to happen and who should do it, a machine or a human, so the checklist mostly runs itself.

That is how this one is organized: continuous checks, every-scan checks, weekly reviews, monthly reviews, and event-triggered checks for deploys and updates. Disclosure: MyKavo is our product, and one section of this checklist maps almost exactly to what it automates. The rest is yours either way.

The short version: 10 essential checks

If you do nothing else, monitor these on your key pages: uptime, SSL expiry, robots meta and indexability, title tags, internal links, critical scripts (analytics and payments), visual layout, content on money pages, page weight, and your forms or checkout. The full checklist below expands each layer.

Continuous checks (always-on, fully automated)

These run around the clock with any uptime monitor, including free ones.

• [ ] Uptime and HTTP status on every key page, not just the homepage. A 500 on /checkout with a healthy homepage is the expensive kind of "up".
• [ ] SSL certificate validity and expiry window. An expired certificate is the most preventable outage on the internet. Alert at 30 and 7 days out.
• [ ] Domain expiry. Rare, catastrophic, and 100% avoidable with one alert.
• [ ] Response time on key pages. Watch the trend, not single spikes. A slow week is a signal; a slow minute is the internet.

Every-scan checks (daily for business sites)

This is the change-detection layer: each check compares the live page against an approved baseline. Doing these by hand across even ten pages is unrealistic, which is why this whole section is automation territory.

• [ ] Robots meta and indexability. A page flipping from index to noindex should be treated as critical. This single check pays for the habit.
• [ ] Title tags and meta descriptions on pages that earn search traffic. Silent rewrites by plugins and templates are common.
• [ ] Canonical URLs. A wrong canonical quietly hands your rankings to another URL.
• [ ] H1s and headings on key pages. Page builders and theme updates love these.
• [ ] Visual layout versus baseline. A screenshot diff catches the broken hero, the overlapping button, the vanished section.
• [ ] Content on money pages: prices, claims, CTAs, contact details. Unapproved edits and injected content both show up here.
• [ ] Internal links resolving. New 404s inside your own site leak both users and crawl equity.
• [ ] Outbound links resolving. Dead external links erode trust and quality signals.
• [ ] Redirect chains and loops. Chains grow one well-meant redirect at a time until crawlers give up.
• [ ] Critical scripts present: analytics, payment, chat, consent. A rebuild that drops Google Analytics costs you a month of data before most teams notice.
• [ ] No unexpected scripts or iframes added. The classic signature of an injection or a rogue plugin.
• [ ] Page weight versus baseline. A 38% jump after a deploy means someone shipped uncompressed images or a new bundle.
• [ ] Conversion elements present: the signup button, the add-to-cart, the lead form. Existence is checkable; check it.
• [ ] Sitemap accessible and valid. Crawlers should always find a current map.
• [ ] robots.txt unchanged. One bad line here can deindex a site.

Everything in this section is what MyKavo checks on every scan, grouped into one severity-ranked alert with before-and-after evidence. Free for 1 site and 5 pages, $20/month for 8 sites with 15 pages each.

Weekly checks (15 minutes, human review)

Machines flag; humans judge. Once a week:

• [ ] Review the week's change alerts and approve intentional changes as new baselines, so alerts stay meaningful.
• [ ] Google Search Console: indexing errors, coverage drops, security or manual action notices.
• [ ] Analytics sanity check: tracking still firing on all templates, no unexplained traffic cliffs.
• [ ] Core Web Vitals spot check on your top two or three pages.
• [ ] Uptime report review: repeated small blips at the same hour are a pattern, not noise.
• [ ] One real form or checkout submission. Monitoring confirms the button exists; a human confirms the flow completes.

Monthly checks (30 minutes, keeps the system honest)

• [ ] Full-site crawl for broken links, redirect buildup and orphan pages beyond your monitored set.
• [ ] Review the monitored-page list. New pages earning traffic or revenue belong on the every-scan list; retire pages that no longer matter.
• [ ] Test your alert channels. Send a test to Slack and email and confirm the right humans still receive it. Alerts that route to a former employee are a common quiet failure.
• [ ] Audit third-party scripts. Everything loading on your pages should still be needed, known and current.
• [ ] Confirm backups reported success this month. Verifying the job ran is a check; running restores is maintenance, and belongs on that checklist.

After every deploy, plugin update or migration (event-triggered)

Most silent breakage is born in these moments, so the checklist has a trigger, not a schedule:

• [ ] Run a manual scan immediately instead of waiting for the next scheduled one.
• [ ] Verify SEO tags on affected templates: titles, robots meta, canonicals.
• [ ] Verify critical scripts survived, especially analytics and payments after rebuilds.
• [ ] Eyeball key templates on mobile and desktop, or let the visual diff do it and review the result.
• [ ] Submit one test through your most important form or checkout.
• [ ] Re-approve baselines for every change you intended, so tomorrow's scan starts clean.

What to automate versus check by hand

The honest split: the continuous and every-scan sections, 19 checks, are machine work, and pretending otherwise is how checklists die. The weekly and monthly sections are judgment work that a machine cannot do for you, and they stay short precisely because the machine handled the rest. The event-triggered section is both: one click to scan, five minutes to review.

If you are assembling the automated layer from free pieces, our guide to monitoring website changes walks through the options, and the website monitoring tools roundup compares ten tools across the category.

Free tools for one-off checks

No account needed, useful for spot checks and for working through this list manually the first time:

• Meta Tag Checker for titles, descriptions, canonicals, robots meta and H1s.
• Bulk URL Status Checker for status codes and response times on up to 20 URLs.
• Redirect Chain Checker for chains and loops.
• Script Detector for a full inventory of external scripts on a page.
• Website Change Detector to snapshot a page now and diff it later.

The bottom line

A checklist you have to remember is a checklist you will eventually forget. Sort the checks by cadence, hand the daily layer to a machine, and keep the human layer short enough to actually happen every week.

MyKavo automates the entire every-scan section of this list on every monitored page, and turns the results into one severity-ranked alert. Start free, and let the checklist run itself from tomorrow morning.