All checks

DomainCare runs 13 automated checks on every domain you add. Each check monitors a different aspect of your domain's health and fires alerts when something changes or needs attention.

Check types

Check	What it monitors	Default	Available presets
Uptime	HTTP response status, latency, redirect chains	1 min	1 min / 5 min / 15 min
SSL / TLS	Certificate expiry, chain validity, protocol version, cipher strength	6 h	6 h / 24 h / 7 d
DNS records	A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, TXT, SOA, CAA, PTR; alerts on any change	1 h	15 min / 1 h / 6 h
Nameservers	Registrar delegation monitoring — alerts the moment your nameserver set changes	12 h	6 h / 24 h / 7 d
Email deliverability	SPF, DKIM, DMARC records and configuration	6 h	6 h / 24 h / 7 d
Domain registry (RDAP)	Registrar, status codes, expiry date, registrant changes	12 h	6 h / 24 h / 7 d
Blacklist	Domain and IP reputation across 49 DNSBL sources including Google Safe Browsing	6 h	6 h / 24 h / 7 d
Robots.txt	Existence, accessibility, validity, content changes	12 h	6 h / 24 h / 7 d
Sitemap	Existence, accessibility, XML validity	24 h	6 h / 24 h / 7 d
Redirect	HTTP → HTTPS redirect, www canonicalization, chain length	12 h	6 h / 24 h / 7 d
Site Speed	Lighthouse performance scores (mobile + desktop), Core Web Vitals, CrUX field data	24 h	6 h / 24 h / 7 d
Security headers	HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, Permissions-Policy	24 h	6 h / 24 h / 7 d
Open ports	Exposed database and admin ports (MySQL, Redis, Postgres, MongoDB, and more)	24 h	6 h / 24 h / 7 d

CMS & e-commerce detection — DomainCare also fingerprints your CMS (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Ghost, Shopify, Webflow, Squarespace) and your e-commerce platform (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and more — including custom-built stores) when you first add a domain. These run once as attributes, not on a recurring schedule. See CMS detection and E-commerce detection for details.

How checks work

When you add a domain, DomainCare runs all applicable checks immediately and stores the results. After that, each check runs on its own schedule. Every run compares the new result against the previous one and fires alerts for meaningful changes.

Subdomains automatically skip checks that only apply to apex domains (nameservers, RDAP, email auth). You can also mute or disable individual checks from the domain detail page.

Check results

Each check produces one of four states:

• Passing — everything looks good
• Needs attention — something to look at but not critical (e.g. an SSL certificate expiring within 25 days)
• Unavailable — we couldn't reach the provider for this check, so its status is unknown (not the same as a failure — the domain itself may be fine). An unavailable check is grey and informational: it never raises a domain to Needs attention.
• Failing — a confirmed problem that requires action

These same four states drive the tile badges, the status banner on the domain detail page, and the counts on your dashboard, so a check always reads the same way wherever you see it. A domain only reads Needs attention when a real check needs review — never because a provider was merely unreachable. If a domain still has passing checks, the odd unavailable one leaves it Healthy; only when every check is unavailable does the domain itself read Unavailable (grey), never Needs attention.

Some hygiene-grade findings are informational only: MX reverse-DNS (PTR) issues, missing CAA records, security-header grades, medium- and low-risk open ports (FTP/CouchDB/8080/8443), and failing real-user Core Web Vitals. These stay visible as warning text and still produce events, but they don't move a check out of Passing — so your dashboard highlights problems that need action, not chores.

Security-header grades are the one case that depends on your site: grades C and D are informational for every domain, and on a domain we haven't detected as an online store grade F is informational too. On a detected store, a grade F reads Needs attention (amber). No header grade ever reads Failing on any domain. Security headers has the full rules.

One exception outranks the per-run status: a confirmed outage (two consecutive failed uptime probes). The domain then reads Critical with a red "Down" uptime badge everywhere, its other checks pause, and their last-known results are shown greyed-out — on the domain list card too — until the site recovers.

Results appear on the domain detail page, grouped into sections. Click any check tile to see the full detail view with history and diagnostics.