Advanced Technical Checks

Summary#

Advanced Technical Checks runs four technical audits against a single URL in one pass — hreflang, mixed content, the redirect chain and the technology stack. Each returns its own verdict and its own detail table on the same page.

Purpose#

These four faults share one property: a browser hides them. The page loads, so you assume the setup is sound. But the browser follows redirects silently, loads what it can, blocks the rest without telling you, and never mentions a language tag pointed at the wrong region.

They are cheap to find and expensive to leave. A three-hop redirect costs load time on every visit. One script over http: on an https: page is blocked, so a feature silently stops working. This screen asks all four questions at once, so you do not have to remember to ask them separately.

Overview#

Enter one URL. Four checks fire in parallel against the live page.

Every check is a direct fetch of the target page. No data provider and no AI produces the numbers. The four exist as separate tools internally, and each is free, so running them together costs nothing extra.

Benefits#

• One URL, four verdicts, with no re-typing across four screens.
• Everything is read live: the hops, the insecure assets and the hreflang table come from this run's response, HTML and headers.
• A verdict tile per check gives the answer before the detail, so a clean page takes five seconds to confirm.
• Free on any plan, so it is safe to run on every page you touch.

Use Cases#

• Post-migration sweep. After an HTTPS move or a URL restructure, confirm nothing redirects three times or loads over http:.
• International rollout. See the full hreflang table, including whether x-default is present.
• Inherited-site discovery. Find out what a site runs on before promising anything.
• A feature that "sometimes does not work". An active mixed-content block is a common cause and never shows in a screenshot.
• Competitor teardown. Read their stack and redirect configuration.

Requirements#

• A signed-in account. Any plan, including Free.
• A publicly reachable URL. Pages behind a login or an allowlist cannot be fetched.
• No integration, no verified domain, no credits.

Permissions#

Available on every plan and to every team role. Nobody sees a reduced version or an upgrade prompt here.

Cost#

0 credits. All four checks are free technical tools, and none touches your monthly allowance. The screen states it under the four explanation cards: "All four run in parallel and none of them costs credit, so running them together is no more expensive than running one."

Free runs count toward the hourly ceiling of 100 light-tool calls. Because this screen fires four calls per run, each run consumes four of that hundred. See Tool limits and performance and How credits work.

Navigation Path#

Dashboard → Site Health → Advanced Technical Checks

Inputs#

Private, loopback and internal addresses are refused before any fetch.

Step-by-Step Guide#

1. Open Site Health, then select Advanced Technical Checks.
2. Read the four cards under Four checks, one URL if you want to know what each check does first.
3. Type the URL in the field marked example.com, including the path when you want a specific page checked.
4. Select Run all checks, or press Enter. The button reads Running… and four tiles appear.
5. Read the summary line: N of 4 checks passed for <url>.
6. Select any tile to jump to that check's detail section.
7. Export with Export PDF, Export Excel, Export CSV, Export JSON or Share public link at the top of the screen.

Reading the Results#

The summary line#

N of 4 checks passed for <url>. Four of four means nothing on this page needs your attention. Anything less tells you how much work is waiting before you read a single number.

The four verdict tiles#

Each tile carries the check name, a headline and a one-line subtitle, toned as pass, warning or fail, and links down to its detail section.

Hreflang

Mixed Content

Redirect Chain

Tech Stack

The detail sections#

Hreflang. A key/value block — Total tags, From HTML, From headers, Unique languages, x-default (Yes/No) — then a table of hreflang code against URL, up to 25 rows with a Showing 25 of N note beyond that. Look for a language or region code that does not exist, and a URL pointing at a page that is not the alternate it claims to be. With no tags you see "No hreflang tags were found on this page."

Mixed Content. A key/value block — HTTPS, Total, Active, Passive — then a table of resource type against URL, up to 25 rows. Active entries are already blocked, so fix those first. A clean page shows "No insecure subresources found on this page."

Redirect Chain. A key/value block — Start, Final, Final status, Redirects — then a numbered hop table with the status and URL at each step. Look for a 302 where a 301 belongs, an https URL redirecting to http, and any chain of three or more. A final status other than 200 means the destination itself is broken, which no amount of chain tidying fixes.

Tech Stack. A key/value block — Detected, Categories, Status — then the technologies grouped by category as chips, each with its confidence where available. Absence is often the finding: no analytics chip on a commercial site, or no CDN on a slow one. With no matches you see "No technologies were detected."

Recommendations#

When any check produces findings, the highest-severity six are merged into one list across all four and offered to the recommendations panel above the detail sections. Each item can route you to the individual tool it came from. The panel is a paid feature; see Get Recommendations.

If a check fails to run#

A check returning no data shows its error text in place of its detail, and the other three still render. One failure never blocks the report.

Examples#

Screenshots#

Tips#

• Enter the exact URL you care about, path included. Testing the homepage tells you nothing about a template used only on product pages.
• Test the pre-redirect URL. Entering the final destination hides the chain you are trying to measure.
• Select a tile rather than scrolling; each jumps to its own section.
• Tech Stack is the only one of the four as interesting on a competitor's site as on your own.

Best Practices#

• Keep every redirect to a single hop, and use 301 for anything permanent.
• Serve every subresource over https:, and never mix.
• Declare x-default alongside your language alternates, and keep every hreflang set reciprocal.
• Re-run after any deploy touching routing, the CDN or the head template.
• Pair it with Security Headers on the same URL; between them they cover almost everything the response can tell you.

Common Mistakes#

• Selecting "Try an example" to fill the field. It replaces the field with stripe.com and runs immediately.
• Entering a bare domain when the problem is on a specific page. The path is used, so example.com checks a different page from example.com/product/x.
• Reading "None found" on Hreflang as a fault. A single-language site has nothing to declare.
• Treating passive mixed content as harmless. It does not break the page, but it downgrades the connection indicator.
• Assuming "None detected" on Tech Stack means custom-built. It usually means the fingerprints were minified or proxied away.

Limitations#

• Hreflang and Mixed Content tables show up to 25 rows each; longer lists are truncated with a note.
• The page is fetched as served. JavaScript is not executed, so a resource injected at runtime is invisible to the mixed-content scan.
• Redirect Chain follows a bounded number of hops, so a redirect loop reports as a long chain rather than as a loop.
• Tech Stack fingerprints what is visible in the response. Server-side software with no client-side trace is not detected.
• This screen does not use the shared result shell, so it has no category tabs and no "You already ran this" prompt. Results are not cached.

Troubleshooting#

FAQs#

Does running four checks cost four times as much? No. All four are free, so the total is 0 credits. The only shared resource is the hourly fair-use allowance, where one run counts as four calls.

Can I run just one of the four? Not from this screen; it always runs all four. They are cheap, they read the same response, and the combined verdict is more useful than any one alone.

Why does the redirect chain differ from what my browser shows? Your browser caches redirects and may hold an HSTS entry that skips the first hop silently. This tool makes a clean request every time, so it shows the chain a first-time visitor and a crawler actually experience.

Is the technology detection reliable enough to quote to a client? Treat it as evidence, not proof. Detections carry a confidence value where available, and server-side software with no client-side trace never appears. It is a strong starting point, not an inventory.

Does this replace a full site crawl? No. It inspects one URL in depth. Use Site Audit for site-wide coverage and Sitemap Validator for the sitemap itself.