How can I check if my site is working properly?
If you want to test that your site is working properly (particularly if you see some sort of unusual problem and you want to see if it’s just caused by an issue on your computer), you might want to try these independent, third-party sites.
Instant site checks
For a simple test of a Web site, try CheckSite.us.
If you have a blog, Is my blog working? gives you more blog-specific details. (If you see a message saying "Your blog application doesn’t support gzip compression", you can enable compression, preferably with the WP Super Cache WordPress plugin.)
Detailed technical tests
WebPageTest shows extremely detailed performance characteristics of your site. (After viewing the results, you might be interested in our pages explaining how to increase browser caching and enable compression.)
Load Impact allows you to test how much your site slows down when 50 people visit it at once.
If you want to check the DNS settings for your domain name, intoDNS is a great resource we often use ourselves. DNSValidation is similar. What’s My DNS? can query multiple DNS servers around the world.
If you want to do a simple ping test, Site24X7 has a page that allows simultaneous tests from many locations.
If your site uses an SSL certificate, Qualys SSL Labs offers a detailed technical SSL test. On this test, it’s normal to not get a perfect score of 100; what matters is that it shows an overall rating of “A”.
You can check some technical details of the HTTP headers sent by a URL on your site using redbot.org.
Ongoing monitoring services
Services like SiteUptime can check your site for problems at regular intervals.
E-mail blacklist checks
Our spam filtering system uses “blacklists” (among other things) to check whether mail from a certain IP address should be allowed. The Anti-Abuse Project has a page you can use to check any IP address to see if it’s on any blacklists.
Web browser appearance checks
If you want to see what your site looks like in many different Web browsers, Browsershots offers a free service that takes lots of screen shots and displays the results.