Uptime.com Blog

How Do You Test Domain Health?

Domain health refers to the overall operational integrity and security of your website’s infrastructure. It typically encompasses factors like the status of your domain registration, the efficiency and configuration of your domain name system (DNS) settings, the responsiveness and reliability of your servers, and the robustness of the security protocols.

When these elements align, your users get the performance they expect from a trusted domain. The sites load quickly, are consistently available, and provide clear security, resulting in better visitor retention and customer conversion rates.

Additionally, search engines use domain health as a ranking factor for their algorithms and prioritize sites that are reliable and quick to load, which indicates that the site is of quality.

To help you keep your site running smoothly, we’ll show you a few manual methods for monitoring your domain’s status.

DNS Servers and Configurations

A functioning domain name system (DNS) server acts as a translator, turning human-friendly domain names into machine-friendly IP addresses. Without it, we’d have to navigate the web using strings of numbers or alphanumeric sequences rather than familiar names.

When a DNS is configured correctly, your visitors will reach the server quickly when they type your domain name into your browser. This prevents website downtime, slow loading times, and potential customers being sent to a different site altogether.

Testing DNS Servers and Configurations

You can use your Windows Command Prompt to test whether your primary DNS records are configured correctly:

Full DNS Record

1. Type nslookup and hit Enter in Command Prompt to specify which DNS records you’re interested in.
2. Type nslookup -q=recordtype yourdomain.com, replacing the record type with the desired record:
3. nslookup -q=A yourdomain.com for the (A) Address Record, which points a domain to an IPv4 address.
4. nslookup -q=AAAA yourdomain.com for the AAAA Record, which points a domain to an IPv6 address.
5. nslookup -q=TXT yourdomain.com to insert text into the DNS record to verify email sender policies, domain ownership, etc.
6. nslookup -q=MX yourdomain.com for the (MX) Mail Exchange Record directs email to a mail server by telling email delivery services where emails sent to your domain should be routed.
7. nslookup -q=NS yourdomain.com for the (NS) Name Server Record, which indicates the authoritative source for domain information.

Whois Record

1. Download the Whois zip file from Microsoft and extract it to the desired destination.
2. Use the Command Prompt to navigate to the directory where you extracted the executable using cd D:\whois, replacing the D: with your actual file location.
3. Run the whois command with D:whois> whois yourdomain.com to check your domain’s name registration, ownership record, and expiry date.

Web Server Health

Your website is hosted on a server that responds to the inputs from the user’s browser by delivering a particular set of content—layouts, images, text, videos, etc.—based on the instructions given. The healthier the web server, the better your site’s performance, so you’ll want to keep a close eye on it to maximize your uptime.

Testing Site Speed

You can use Command Prompt to measure how long it takes for a packet of data to transfer from your computer to the server and back again for insights into whether communication delays are slowing down your domain.

1. Open Command Prompt
2. Type ping yourdomain.com or ping yourIPaddress for a record of the number of packets sent, packets received, the percentage of data loss, and approximate round trip times in milliseconds.

Testing Web Server HTTP and HTTPS Status

At some point on the internet, you’ve encountered a webpage that says something like “404 Page Not Found.” Servers issue these three-digit Hypertext Transfer Protocol/Secure (HTTP/HTTPS) codes to indicate the result of a particular request and offer information on what went right or wrong.

There are 63 codes total, and the first digit indicates a more general umbrella under which the specific status falls:

• 1XX Informational: The server received the request and will continue the content-serving process.
• 2XX Success: The server successfully received and understood the request.
• 3XX Redirect: There is a new iteration of a resource at a different URL.
• 4XX Client Error: There was an issue with the request.
• 5XX Server Error: Something went wrong on the server end that is preventing fulfillment.

To check your web server’s HTTP and HTTPS statuses, you’ll need to use a tool like HTTPstatus and manually input the URLs you want to check. Once the site has processed the list of URLs, it’ll return a summary of details that explain what a particular status code means.

Testing for SSL Certificate Expiry

To implement HTTPS, you’ll need to install an SSL certificate on your site as a security measure that ensures all sensitive data is encrypted and safe from interception from ne’er-do-wells. However, these certificates typically expire approximately 13 months or 397 days from the date of issuance.

The easiest way to check whether your SSL Certificate is still valid is to navigate to your domain and check whether the URL contains “https” and has a padlock icon next to it in the search bar.

You can also plug your URL into tools like Comodo’s SSL Checker to get information about the server IP address, server type, issuer, and time until expiry.

Malware and Blacklist Monitoring

While it would be ideal if the digital landscape were free of malicious parties seeking to turn your website into a base of operations for their criminal activities, the allure of user data is simply too tempting to keep these online pickpockets at bay.

To limit the chances of spam and malware worming its way through the internet, servers create “blacklists,” or databases of IP addresses and domains identified as a source of malicious activity. Once your domain has made its way onto a blacklist, it can prevent your emails from being delivered and plummet your traffic, as recipient servers will automatically reject your domain as a security measure.

Testing Malware and Blacklist Status

While no Command Prompt instruction can scan for malware, you can monitor your website traffic logs for abnormal patterns.

Large, unexpected spikes in traffic or unusual requests can often indicate an attempt to exploit vulnerabilities. Another measure you can take is regularly checking file integrity with known, trusted backups, as changes made by unauthorized persons are also indicative of malicious tampering.

Manual blacklist monitoring requires typing your domain name or domain IP into sites like DeBouncer or DNSBL, which will then compare that data to its collection of blacklists.

Sound Complicated? Uptime.com Makes Monitoring Domain Health Simple

Wouldn’t it be handy if you could keep an eye on all of these factors of domain health from one convenient dashboard? With uptime.com, you can! You can give us a shot with our free Domain Health Check and gain insights into 23 areas of domain health.

If you like what you see, sign up for a 14-day free trial and gain access to our complete suite of domain health monitoring and alerting tools.

Admin