What a review looks like
A real review of a real site, with the name, the addresses, and most of the technical detail taken out. The site belongs to a nonprofit and runs to about 1,900 pages. This was its first full review: a crawl of every address, a check of every outbound link, and a look at the server and domain behind it. The full report holds the detail; this is the note the person in charge of the site reads.
- Up
- Yes. Pages answer in a quarter of a second, and the server took four and a half hours of steady requests without a hiccup.
- Current
- Not quite. The analytics tag stopped counting in 2023, and the sitemap has not changed in three years.
- Secure
- Yes, with one header to add. Everything is served over HTTPS with no insecure content.
What is working
The site itself is in good health. It is fast, it is served securely, and the content structure is clear. For a site of this size the number of broken internal links (68) is low. Nothing below is an emergency. All of it is a modest change for whoever administers the CMS and the server.
1. Every page has four addresses, and nothing says which one counts
The site answers in full with and without the www, and one of its main sections answers under two different paths. No page declares which address is the real one. Search engines treat each address as a separate page, so the site’s search credit is split up to four ways, and crawlers spend most of their visit re-reading duplicates.
The fix: choose one hostname, redirect the other to it, settle on one path for that section, and turn on canonical addresses in the CMS. This is the one to do first; every other search improvement compounds on it.
2. The sitemap shows search engines 26 pages of 1,900
A sitemap exists, but it lists only 26 top-level pages, 21 of them unchanged for three or more years, and nothing tells search engines it is there. Six of its 26 entries are also unreachable from the site’s own navigation, including the contact page and the two pages that explain how to apply. A visitor can only reach them by knowing the address.
The fix: point search engines at the sitemap, have the CMS include every published section in it, drop the utility pages, and add menu links to the orphaned pages.
3. Analytics stopped counting three years ago
Every page still carries the old analytics tag. That service was retired in 2023, so the site has recorded no visitor data since. Replacing the snippet in the master template restores measurement with one edit.
4. Outbound links have rotted
Of 987 outside links checked, 57 lead to pages that no longer exist, 29 point at domains that have vanished entirely, and 83 land somewhere other than they promise, often a parked domain that now serves ads. One is site-wide: a social link in the footer is refused by the network it points to. The report holds the full worklist, ranked by how many pages each link appears on.
Smaller items, for the same visit
No page has a description or social-card tags, so links shared to social media or chat apps show as bare addresses. 567 images lack alt text, an accessibility gap. One logo weighs 12.4 MB and 103 other images are oversized. And the server sends no HSTS header.
A sensible order: item 1 first, then 2 and 3 (each is an afternoon), with the link cleanup as ongoing maintenance from the report’s lists.
What happens next
For a site I look after, this is where the review turns into a worklist: the fixes get done, or handed to whoever runs the CMS with exact instructions, and the next review checks that they held. The crawl runs again on a regular basis, so the list stays short.
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