Have you ever wondered, how healthy is your site? Healthy as in no broken links or images. You may assume that your blog or your website is only a very small structure, chances of it happening are rather small … however you will be surprise of what you may find. Sometimes there may be backend codes that you’ve used before but totally forgotten about them and over time the link may be redundant or kaput. Hence sometimes you may notice that in your browser there is a little exclamation mark on the bottom left of your browser and you don’t know where to fix it. Other incidences are such as:

• Site structural / hierarchy change
• Application upgrades
• Old tracking codes
• External site link changes
• File name change
• Expired content
• Deleted files

Site health is a form of site maintenance but they are often overlooked. Definitely in our little personal sites we don’t even bother, but in my experience even corporate sites may not consider it as a priority – similarly to us, all we wanted to do is to push the content live as soon as possible. But think of it this way, contents are actually our asset or some may say our product. So considering the ‘visitors’ who steps in to our website and noticed that there is a broken image, or a broken link … how would your visitor feel? On top of my head, I would think that I may just leave as soon as possible figuring that the website is abandoned by the owner and the contents are no longer valid. Please bear in mind that your legacy contents are all indexed in the search engine, hence chances of people landing into them are pretty high – I am assuming that you do want all your contents to be indexed.

If you are really interested in checking out your site health, download the Xenu’s Link Sleuth (TM) site checker tool from http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html. It is free and works well for me so far!

One last pointer! Site maintenance is not a one off thing; it is a periodic task that you need to do it lets says once a month or so (depending on how dynamic your site is).