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Speed, SEO & SSL

Read Web Vitals, SEO signals (robots / sitemap / canonical), DNS, and SSL/expiry — and know what to do when one drops.

These are the quiet failures: a slow page that costs rankings, a canonical that drifts, a certificate that's about to expire. DeadWatch reads them all and shows them on each site's tabs and in the Watch Tower on the site Overview.

Trailhead Outfitters' Performance tab showing graded Core Web Vitals chips — a poor LCP and TBT driving the low score — plus the performance trend and largest resources
The Performance tab for Trailhead Outfitters — Web Vitals graded good / needs-improvement / poor, with trends and the heaviest resources.

Web Vitals (speed)

  1. Open a site and go to the Performance tab.
  2. Read the metrics — each is graded good / needs-improvement / poor:
    • LCP — Largest Contentful Paint (good ≤2.5s)
    • FCP — First Contentful Paint (good ≤1.8s)
    • CLS — Cumulative Layout Shift (good ≤0.1)
    • TBT — Total Blocking Time (good ≤200ms)
    • TTFB — Time to First Byte (good ≤800ms)
    • INP — Interaction to Next Paint, plus Speed Index and Load
  3. Use Metric Trends and Performance Trend to see whether a regression is new, and Largest Resources to find what's slowing the page.

The site Overview shows the headline Core Web Vitals chips (LCP, FCP, CLS, TBT, TTFB, Load) at a glance.

Act on it: a jump in LCP or TBT usually points to a heavy new asset or script — check Largest Resources and the navigation-timing breakdown (DNS / TCP / TLS / Response / DOM), then route a perf.degraded alert so you catch the next one early.

SEO signals

  1. Open a site and go to the SEO tab.
  2. Review the baselines:
    • Robots.txt — present, and whether it Blocks All
    • Sitemap — found, with URL count
    • Canonical Tags — Set or Missing
    • Structured Data (schema)
  3. The SEO Baselines card in the Watch Tower mirrors these for a quick read.

Act on it: a canonical that flips to Missing or a robots.txt that suddenly Blocks All is exactly the kind of silent change that tanks search traffic with no error page. Alert on content.drifted / SEO events and fix before rankings move.

DNS

  1. On the site Overview, open the Domain & DNS card in the Watch Tower (or the Security tab for full records).
  2. Read the record counts and posture: A (IPv4), AAAA (IPv6), MX (mail), NS, TXT, and email auth — SPF (Present / Missing) and DMARC (Present / Missing).

Act on it: unexpected record changes can signal a migration — or a takeover. Cross-check with the Triage patterns and integrity events.

SSL/TLS & expiry

  1. Open the SSL / TLS card in the Watch Tower (Overview).
  2. Read Status, CN, Issuer, Expires, Protocol, Cipher, and the Grade.
  3. The Sites board shows a *🔒 SSL Nd badge as expiry approaches, and 🌍 Domain Nd* for domain expiry.

Act on it: wire an ssl.expiring (and domain.expiring) rule so you get days of warning — never a surprise "your site says not secure" call from a client.

You'll know it worked when… every card in the Watch Tower reads green and your alert rules cover expiry, perf, and SEO drift.

Next: Security monitoring → — headers, exposed files, and hijacking signals.