📋 What Is the Healthy Pages Count?
The healthy pages metric in the Site Health Audit shows the number of pages on your site that have no detected SEO issues. A page is counted as healthy only when it passes all checks performed during the audit — including crawlability, indexability, metadata, response codes, and more.
If you are seeing a number that feels lower than expected, this is almost always because some pages have at least one issue flagged against them, which moves them out of the healthy count — even if the issue is minor.
🔍 Why Is Your Healthy Page Count Low?
Several common reasons cause the healthy pages number to be lower than the total number of pages crawled:
- Pages with warnings: Pages flagged with warnings — such as missing meta descriptions, slow load times, or thin content — are not counted as fully healthy.
- Pages with errors: Any page returning a 4xx or 5xx status code, or blocked by robots.txt, is excluded from the healthy count.
- Redirect chains: Pages involved in redirect chains or loops are flagged and removed from the healthy count.
- Noindex tags: Pages carrying a noindex directive may be excluded from the healthy count depending on your audit configuration.
- Incomplete crawl: If the audit crawled only a portion of your site — due to crawl limits, login-gated pages, or crawl depth settings — the total pages discovered may be lower than expected, which directly affects how many can be counted as healthy.
- Recently added pages: Pages added after the last audit run will not appear until you refresh the audit.
🗺️ How to Identify Which Pages Are Not Healthy
- Navigate to the Site Health Audit from the left sidebar.
- Open your site's audit report and locate the Issues or Pages tab.
- Filter the page list by status — look for pages marked as Errors, Warnings, or Notices.
- Click into any flagged page to see the specific issues preventing it from being counted as healthy.
- Prioritise fixing errors first, as these have the greatest impact on your healthy page count and overall SEO performance.
🔄 How to Refresh or Re-run Your Audit
Your healthy page count reflects the state of your site at the time of the last audit crawl. If you have recently fixed issues or published new pages, re-run the audit to get an updated count:
- Go to OTTO SEO → Site Audit → Overview (Website Overview).
- Select your site from the list.
- Click Recrawl Site to trigger a new audit.
- Wait for the crawl to complete — crawl time varies based on site size.
- Review the updated healthy pages figure once the audit finishes.
📊 How to Improve Your Healthy Pages Count
Increasing your healthy pages count means resolving the issues flagged on affected pages. Here is a recommended order of priority:
- Fix errors first: Broken links, server errors, and blocked pages have the highest impact. Resolve these before moving to warnings.
- Address missing metadata: Add or complete meta titles and meta descriptions on all pages that are missing them.
- Resolve duplicate content: Use canonical tags to consolidate duplicate or near-duplicate pages.
- Improve page speed: Pages flagged for slow load times can be optimised through image compression, caching, and script management.
- Clear redirect issues: Audit and simplify any redirect chains so pages resolve cleanly in a single hop.
After resolving a batch of issues, re-run the audit to confirm the pages have moved into the healthy count.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
Does a low healthy page count mean my site is performing badly?
Not necessarily. A low count highlights opportunities for improvement. Even sites with strong organic traffic often have a proportion of pages with minor issues. Focus on fixing errors before warnings.
Can the healthy page count ever exceed the total crawled pages?
No. The healthy count is always a subset of the total crawled pages. If the numbers look inconsistent, try re-running the audit to ensure the data is current.
Why does the crawled page total seem lower than my actual site?
Crawl limits, nofollow links, login-required pages, and crawl depth settings can all restrict which pages are discovered. Review your audit settings to ensure the crawler has access to all relevant sections of your site.
💬 Need More Help?
If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.