Domain Health Report

One check for the things that quietly take a business offline: expiry dates, certificates, DNS, email authentication and reputation.

Most domains do not fail dramatically. They fail on a date nobody had in their calendar: a certificate lapses, a registration quietly expires, an SPF record gets one include: too many and invoices start landing in spam. Each of those is preventable, and each one is usually found by a customer rather than by the business.

This runs the checks that actually cost money when they are wrong — registration and certificate expiry, DNS, email authentication, reachability and IP reputation — and puts them in one place, ordered by what to deal with first.

What gets checked

Nine checks, weighted by what it costs you when each one breaks rather than treated as an even list:

  • Domain registration — when it expires. An expired domain takes the website and every email address on it offline at once, and after the grace period anyone can register it.
  • TLS certificate — validity, trust chain and days remaining. An expired certificate shows every visitor a full-page browser warning.
  • DNS — whether the domain resolves at all, over IPv4 and IPv6.
  • Reachability — whether the site answers over HTTPS, and whether plain HTTP redirects to it.
  • SPF and DMARC — the records that decide whether your mail is trusted and whether anyone can send mail pretending to be you.
  • MX — whether the domain can receive email at all.
  • IP reputation — whether your server address is on the major blocklists, which silently stops mail being delivered.

How the score works

Each check contributes according to consequence. DNS failing is worth far more than a missing IPv6 record, because one means nothing works and the other means a slightly longer path for some mobile users.

Anything we could not check counts as unknown and is left out of the score entirely — not counted as a failure. Blocklists rate-limit shared resolvers, and some registries do not publish expiry data. Marking a domain down for that would make the number meaningless, which is the usual failing of scored health tools.

The two that catch people out

Certificate and registration expiry are worth singling out, because they are the only failures on this list with a known date in advance. They are entirely preventable and they still take businesses offline every week — usually because the renewal notice went to an inbox nobody reads, or the card on file expired before the domain did.

If you check nothing else here regularly, check those two. A certificate under 30 days or a registration under 60 is worth acting on now rather than at the deadline.

What this does not tell you

This is a snapshot, not monitoring. It says the domain is healthy at the moment you ran it, which is the right answer to "is something wrong right now" and no help at all against a certificate that expires next month while you are not looking.

It also checks configuration rather than content: it will not tell you a page is slow, a form is broken or a price is wrong. For per-region response times use the global HTTP check; for continuous checks, the uptime monitor.

Frequently asked questions