wikihow.com
wikiHow: How-to instructions you can trust.
2 failed · 7 warnings · 21 passed
Audited Sat, 11 Jul 2026 20:00:32 GMT · https://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page
Meta & Head
20.1/25
Title, description, canonical, social tags — what search engines read first.
Open Graph tagsmedium impactlow effort
No Open Graph tags found
Open Graph tags control how your page looks when shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, WhatsApp, and most chat apps; without them, links render as a bare URL or with guessed text, and far fewer people click through. Add four meta tags to <head>: og:title, og:description, og:url, and og:image — an image around 1200x630 pixels works well across platforms. Use absolute https:// URLs for og:image and og:url; relative paths are the most common reason preview images silently fail to appear.
Meta descriptionhigh impactlow effort
Meta description is "Learn how to do anything with wikiHow, the world's most popular how-to website. Easy, well-researched, and trustworthy instructions for everything you want to know." (169 characters)
Search engines truncate descriptions past roughly 160 characters, and very short ones waste the snippet space that persuades searchers to pick your listing over the next one. Rewrite it to 70–160 characters: state what the page offers, work the primary keyword in naturally (matching words get bolded in results), and end with a benefit or call to action. Don't cram in keywords — the description influences clicks, not rankings, so write it for humans.
7 passing checks
- Title tag<title> is "wikiHow: How-to instructions you can trust." (43 characters)
- Canonical URLCanonical href is "https://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page"
- Viewport meta tagViewport is "initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes, minimum-scale=0.25, maximum-scale=5.0, width=device-width"
- Character encoding declaredCharacter encoding is declared
- FaviconA <link rel="icon"> is present
- Twitter card tagtwitter:card is "summary_large_image"
- Page allows indexingrobots: index,follow
Content & Structure
20.6/25
Headings, copy depth, images, structured data, internal linking.
Image alt textmedium impactlow effort
1 of 152 images have alt text
Alt text is how search engines understand what an image shows — it feeds image-search rankings and is what screen readers announce to blind visitors. Add a short, specific alt attribute to every meaningful image, describing the content rather than listing keywords: alt="Golden retriever puppy playing in snow" beats alt="dog puppy pet animal". Give purely decorative images an empty alt="" instead of omitting the attribute, so assistive technology knows to skip them rather than reading out the filename.
Heading hierarchylow impactlow effort
Heading level jumps from h1 ("Welcome to wikiHow, the most trusted how-to site on the internet.") to h3 ("Trending NowSee more trending")
Headings form the page's outline; when levels jump (h2 straight to h4), search engines and screen readers get a broken table of contents and the relationship between sections turns ambiguous. Fix the jump by stepping down one level at a time — promote the deeper heading, or add the missing intermediate level. The usual cause is choosing heading tags for their default font size; set sizes in CSS instead and let the tags reflect actual document structure.
Hreflang annotationslow impactlow effort
19 hreflang link(s) present but no x-default entry
Your hreflang set has no x-default entry, so search engines must guess which version to show visitors whose language you don't list — and they often pick a poorly matched one. Add <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.example.com/"> pointing at your fallback page, typically the English version or a language-selector page. Remember that hreflang must be reciprocal: every version, including the x-default target, should carry the full set of alternate links back to all the others.
6 passing checks
- Single H1 heading1 h1 found: "Welcome to wikiHow, the most trusted how-to site on the internet."
- Word count8175 words of visible text
- Structured data (JSON-LD)JSON-LD types found: WebSite
- HTML lang attribute<html lang="en">
- JavaScript-dependent contentvisible text ~44283 chars in the initial HTML
- Internal linking241 internal, 24 external links
Technical
21.6/25
HTTPS, redirects, robots, sitemap, speed, crawlability.
Short redirect chainmedium impactlow effort
https://wikihow.com/ (301) → https://www.wikihow.com/ (301) → https://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page
Every redirect hop adds a round-trip before the visitor sees anything, each hop can leak a little link equity, and crawlers abandon long chains — which can leave the destination page undiscovered. Trace the chain above and point the first URL directly at the final destination in a single 301; commonly this means merging separate http-to-https and non-www-to-www rules into one combined redirect. Also update internal links to reference the final URL directly, so most visitors never enter the chain at all.
XML sitemap availablemedium impactlow effort
sitemap.xml is valid but robots.txt does not reference it
Your sitemap is valid, but robots.txt never mentions it, so crawlers you haven't manually notified may never find it — the robots.txt reference is the universal discovery mechanism. Add one line to robots.txt: "Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml", using the full absolute URL (a relative path is invalid here). The line can go anywhere in the file, and you can list several sitemaps. Also submit it in Google Search Console to get indexing-coverage reporting on top of discovery.
Response compression enabledlow impactlow effort
no content-encoding header
This HTML is served uncompressed, so every visitor downloads far more bytes than necessary — text compresses extremely well, and the savings directly speed up first render on slow connections. Enable Brotli or gzip on your server or CDN: in nginx it's "gzip on;" (or the brotli module), in Apache it's mod_deflate via .htaccess, and on most CDNs it's a single toggle. Make sure compression covers all text types (HTML, CSS, JS, JSON, SVG), but skip already-compressed images — recompressing them wastes CPU for no gain.
Missing pages return 404low impactlow effort
missing paths return a non-404 status (soft 404)
URLs that don't exist on your site return a success status instead of 404 — search engines call these soft 404s, keep recrawling them, and may index the useless placeholder pages, wasting crawl budget that should go to real content. Configure your server or framework to return an actual 404 status (or 410 for permanently removed content) along with your error page. The classic mistake is serving a friendly "page not found" template with a 200 status — crawlers ignore the visible message; only the status code counts.
8 passing checks
- Served over HTTPSfinal URL uses https://
- HTTP redirects to HTTPShttp:// redirects to https://
- No mixed content0 http:// subresource references
- robots.txt present and permissiverobots.txt exists and allows crawling
- Fast time to first byte131 ms
- Reasonable HTML size365.6 KB
- www and non-www resolve consistentlywww and non-www converge on the same host
- HTML5 doctype<!DOCTYPE html> present
Performance
Core Web Vitals scoring via Google PageSpeed is coming soon.
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