Why we built this
Every SEO analysis tool we tried was either locked behind a signup wall, plastered with upsells, or gave vague advice like "improve your meta description" without telling you what was wrong. We wanted something different: a tool that fetches a page, parses it properly, and tells you exactly what's missing, what's too long, and what's wrong — in seconds, with no account required.
Meta Tag Checker started as an internal tool we used when auditing client sites. As a web studio, we run a meta tag review on every site we build and every site we take over, and we kept rebuilding the same checklist by hand: is the title the right length, is there a canonical, are the Open Graph tags complete, does every image have alt text? Once we realised how often we reached for it, we turned the checklist into a tool, wrote proper explanations for every check, and put it online for free. It's been running ever since — no hidden tiers, no "premium" version, no watermarks on the results.
How the tool works
We're deliberately open about what happens when you run a check, because a tool that audits other people's pages should be transparent about its own behaviour:
- It fetches the live page over HTTP, following redirects, with the same kind of request a browser or crawler makes. It reads up to the first 2 MB of HTML — enough to parse the
<head>and body without downloading huge pages. - It parses the HTML properly using a real DOM parser rather than guessing with regular expressions, with encoding handling so non-English pages are read correctly.
- It grades against documented, public standards — Google's own length guidance for titles and descriptions, the Open Graph protocol, the W3C HTML specification, and WCAG for image alt text. We don't invent rules; the thresholds we check against are the ones the platforms themselves publish.
- It only fetches public pages. For security, the checker resolves every URL and refuses to request private, internal, or loopback addresses — so it can't be used to probe networks it shouldn't.
Every check is processed in real time and then discarded. We don't store the URLs you submit or the reports we generate — see our privacy policy for the specifics.
Who's behind it
Meta Tag Checker is built and maintained by JWWD, a web development studio that has been building websites and web software since the early 2000s, and published under ModusOp, our product brand. Between client work and our own products, we've shipped, audited, and maintained hundreds of sites across WordPress, Shopify, and custom stacks — so the checks in this tool come from the mistakes we've actually had to find and fix in production, not from a textbook.
SEO advice ages, so we keep the guidance current. When Google changes how it truncates titles, when a rich result type is deprecated, or when a best practice shifts, we update the tool and the articles behind it rather than leaving stale advice online.
Our other free tools
Meta Tag Checker is one of a small suite of free, no-signup tools we maintain for developers and site owners:
- SSL Checker — inspect a site's TLS certificate, chain, and expiry.
- DMARC Dashboard — check and monitor your email authentication records.
- Site Speed Check — measure page load performance.
- Broken Link Finder — crawl a site for dead links.
Learn more
If you want to go deeper than the tool, we've written a library of practical guides: start with the complete guide to meta tags, browse the full blog, or keep the tag reference and glossary on hand while you work.
Get in touch
Questions, feedback, or a bug to report? Head to our contact page and send us a message — we read everything, and a fair few of the tool's checks started life as suggestions from people who use it.