The guides that protect
the traffic you earned

02 HTTP 500, 502, 503: what each code actually means Three error codes, three very different causes. Reading the number before opening the code saves an hour of guessing: here is what each one points to. 7 min read Read → 03 What an hour of downtime actually costs you Lost sales are the visible part. The bill also includes the calls, the interrupted work and the trust that does not come back. A simple way to put a number on it. 7 min read Read → 04 Why your host will not tell you your site is down Hosting providers monitor their machines, not your website. Which is why a server can be perfectly healthy while visitors get an error page. 7 min read Read → 05 How often should you check a website? Every minute is not always better. The right interval depends on what an hour of downtime costs you, and on what you would actually do with the information at 3am. 7 min read Read → 06 Self-hosted or external monitoring: how to choose A script on your own server or an outside service? The honest comparison, including the cases where writing it yourself is the right answer. 7 min read Read → 07 Expired SSL certificate: what your visitors see Not a warning banner, a full-page red block that most people never get past. Why it happens on a working server, and how to stop it happening. 7 min read Read → 08 Let's Encrypt renewal: the three classic failures Automatic renewal works until it does not, and it never says so. The three ways it breaks, and the one check that catches all of them. 7 min read Read → 09 HTTPS and SEO: what it actually changes Four concrete things change when a site moves to HTTPS. Ranking is the smallest of them, and the one everybody talks about. 7 min read Read → 10 Monitoring 1 site or 100: what really changes Not the tool. What changes is naming, who gets told, and what you do when twelve sites alert at once. Below five sites, none of this matters. 7 min read Read → 11 What to send a client every month A monthly report is not a data dump. It answers one question: was my site fine, and if not, what did you do? Four sections and a rule about silence. 7 min read Read → 12 Alerts: finding the setting between silence and spam The interval decides how often you look. The alert rules decide what you hear about. Get the second wrong and the first stops mattering. 7 min read Read →

02 Error 404: when to fix it, when to leave it A 404 is a valid answer, not a bug. Most of the ones in your report deserve nothing at all. Here is how to tell which few actually cost you something. 7 min read Read → 03 Redirect or delete a page: the decision tree You are about to remove a page. Four questions decide whether it deserves a 301, a 410, or nothing at all, and the honest answer is often nothing. 7 min read Read → 04 Dead outbound links quietly damage your credibility Nobody audits the links leaving their site. They are the ones your reader clicks first, and the only ones that make an article look abandoned. 7 min read Read → 05 Site migration: the link check-list Migrations break links in four distinct places, and teams usually only check one. What to verify before, on the day, and in the weeks after. 7 min read Read → 06 Crawl budget: why it is probably not your problem Crawl budget is real, and it almost certainly does not apply to your site. Here is who it actually concerns, and what people mistake for it. 7 min read Read →