Free guide

The 9-Point Website Check

Nine things worth checking on your own site. Most take under five minutes. None of them break loudly, which is exactly why they sit there for years.

1. Do you actually own your domain?

Check

Log into your website host. Find where your domain is registered. If it's registered through your website platform rather than at an independent registrar, your domain and your hosting are tangled together.

Why it matters

Cancel the wrong thing and you can put your domain at risk. Transfers take days, not minutes, so you can't fix this in a hurry.

Fix

Move your domain to a registrar that only does domains — Namecheap, Cloudflare, and Porkbun are all common choices. Then your site can move anywhere without touching it.

2. Could you rebuild from scratch tomorrow?

Check

Open your site. Could you list every page, every link, every image, and every downloadable file on it right now?

Why it matters

Files hosted on your platform's servers disappear when your account does. PDFs, images, audio — all of it.

Fix

Before you change anything, pull a full inventory. Every page's text, meta title and description, every link and where it points, every image and file. Screenshot each page. Download everything hosted on your platform's CDN.

Quick tip

You don't have to do this by hand. Ask Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini to read your site and pull the page copy, meta tags, and links into one document you can edit. It'll get you 90% of the way in a few minutes.

What it won't catch: anything behind a login, your form settings, your redirect rules, or exactly which files are sitting on your host's servers. Check those in your admin panel yourself.

3. Is there anywhere to give you an email address?

Check

Visit your own site as a stranger. Is there a single field where someone can sign up?

Why it matters

Social followers are rented. If the platform changes its algorithm tomorrow, that audience is gone. An email list is the only audience you own outright.

Fix

One form. It doesn't have to be beautiful. MailerLite, Buttondown, Beehiiv, and Kit all have free or cheap starter tiers — compare current pricing, it changes often.

4. Are your transcripts and documents PDFs?

Check

Look at how your transcripts, guides, or written content are published. Are they linked PDFs, or actual text on a page?

Why it matters

PDFs are close to invisible to search engines and effectively invisible to AI assistants. If your transcripts are PDFs, the most searchable content you own is locked in a format almost nothing can read.

Fix

Publish as real HTML text on the page. Keep the PDF as a download if you want, but the text has to live on the page.

5. Does every page have its own title and description?

Check

Open each page and view source. Look for <title> and <meta name="description">.

Why it matters

These are what show up in search results and what AI assistants read first. Many sites repeat the site name across every page, or leave descriptions empty.

Fix

Write a unique title and a real one-sentence description for every page. Titles get truncated around 55–60 characters and descriptions around 150–160, but that's by pixel width, not character count — use a SERP preview tool to check.

6. Do you have structured data?

Check

View source and search for application/ld+json. If nothing comes up, you have none.

Why it matters

Structured data is how you tell search engines and AI systems what you actually are. Without it you're a page nothing can categorize.

Fix

Add it. Sample below.

7. Does your About page answer the questions people actually ask?

Check

Read your About page. Does it answer "is this for kids?", "how long is it?", "where do I start?" — in plain, self-contained sentences?

Why it matters

AI assistants lift passages, not pages. An answer has to make sense on its own, without the paragraph before it.

Fix

Write out the ten questions you get asked most. Answer each one in two or three plain sentences. Put them on the page as real text — and if you use an accordion, make sure the answers are in the page source on load, not injected when someone clicks.

8. Are your links still alive?

Check

Click every link on your site. Then check the places you don't look at — email footers, podcast show notes, link-in-bio, old social posts.

Why it matters

Show notes and email footers reach people who are already paying attention. A dead link there costs more than a dead link on your homepage.

Fix

Fix them. And when you move your site, set up 301 redirects from old URLs to new ones so existing links keep working.

9. Is your copy still true?

Check

Read every page as if you've never seen it. Look for anything in future tense about something that already happened, any dates, any "coming soon."

Why it matters

Stale copy is the fastest way to look inactive. "Launching this spring" on a two-year-old page tells visitors nobody's home.

Fix

Rewrite it. Then put a calendar reminder to reread the whole site twice a year.

Sample podcast schema

Two blocks. The first goes on your homepage, the second on each episode page. Replace everything in CAPS.

Series — homepage

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "PodcastSeries",
  "@id": "https://YOURSITE.com/#podcast-series",
  "name": "YOUR SHOW NAME",
  "url": "https://YOURSITE.com/",
  "description": "ONE OR TWO SENTENCES ABOUT YOUR SHOW.",
  "genre": ["GENRE", "GENRE"],
  "inLanguage": "en",
  "numberOfEpisodes": 0,
  "webFeed": "YOUR RSS FEED URL",
  "image": "https://YOURSITE.com/PATH-TO-COVER-ART.jpg",
  "author": { "@id": "https://YOURSITE.com/#your-name" },
  "publisher": { "@id": "https://YOURSITE.com/#your-company" },
  "sameAs": [
    "APPLE PODCASTS URL",
    "SPOTIFY URL",
    "YOUTUBE URL",
    "INSTAGRAM URL"
  ]
}
</script>

Episode — each episode page

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "PodcastEpisode",
  "@id": "https://YOURSITE.com/episodes/SLUG#episode",
  "url": "https://YOURSITE.com/episodes/SLUG",
  "name": "Episode 1: EPISODE TITLE",
  "episodeNumber": 1,
  "datePublished": "2026-01-01",
  "inLanguage": "en",
  "description": "ONE OR TWO SENTENCES ABOUT THIS EPISODE.",
  "partOfSeries": { "@id": "https://YOURSITE.com/#podcast-series" },
  "partOfSeason": {
    "@type": "PodcastSeason",
    "name": "Season One",
    "seasonNumber": 1
  },
  "associatedMedia": {
    "@type": "AudioObject",
    "contentUrl": "DIRECT MP3 URL",
    "encodingFormat": "audio/mpeg",
    "duration": "PT25M"
  }
}
</script>

Four things that break schema

Comments. JSON has no comment syntax. A // note anywhere inside the script tag stops the whole block from parsing. Put notes in HTML comments outside the tag.

Mismatched URLs. Every @id and url has to match your real URLs exactly — including whether you use www or not. Pick one, redirect the other, use it everywhere.

Wrong placement. Structured data goes in the document <head>. In a React or JavaScript-built site, check the rendered page source to confirm it actually landed there.

Claims you can't back. Anything you put in schema can be picked up and repeated by systems you don't control. Only list awards you actually won.

How to test it

Run these against your live URL after you publish. All free.

Tool	What it tells you	Where
Rich Results Test	Whether Google can read your structured data	search.google.com/test/rich-results
Schema Markup Validator	Whether your JSON-LD is valid at all	validator.schema.org
Sharing Debugger	What your link looks like when shared on Facebook	developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
Search Console	Whether your pages are actually getting indexed	search.google.com/search-console
View source	Whether your text is really in the page	Right-click → View Page Source, then Ctrl+F for a sentence

Tool

Rich Results Test

What it tells you

Whether Google can read your structured data

Where

search.google.com/test/rich-results

Tool

Schema Markup Validator

What it tells you

Whether your JSON-LD is valid at all

Where

validator.schema.org

Tool

Sharing Debugger

What it tells you

What your link looks like when shared on Facebook

Where

developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

Tool

Search Console

What it tells you

Whether your pages are actually getting indexed

Where

search.google.com/search-console

Tool

View source

What it tells you

Whether your text is really in the page

Where

Right-click → View Page Source, then Ctrl+F for a sentence

Tool URLs move. If one 404s, search for it by name.

The one test that matters most

The one test that matters most is the last one. View your page source and search for a sentence from your own content. If it isn't there, search engines and AI assistants can't see it either — no matter how good the page looks in a browser.

Reference

Schema types and properties: schema.org/PodcastSeries and schema.org/PodcastEpisode
Google's structured data documentation: developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data

Or don't do any of this yourself

I built this list the hard way — nine hours, one deadline, and a subscription that was about to expire on a podcast site I'd spent three years making.

It turns out the building is the fast part. It's the inventory, the schema, the transcripts, the redirects, and the forty small things nobody warns you about that eat the day.

I do this for podcasters and creators now. The whole migration, or just the parts you'd rather not touch.

Book a call →

You keep making the show. I'll handle the part that makes people find it.