How to scan your website for vulnerabilities (step by step)

If you own a website, someone is already probing it. Automated bots test millions of sites a day for the same handful of weaknesses — an unescaped form field, a config file left in the open, an out-of-date plugin. The good news: those are exactly the things a vulnerability scan finds first. This guide walks you through scanning your own site, from zero to a fixed report.

What "scanning for vulnerabilities" actually means

A vulnerability scanner visits your website the way an attacker would. It crawls your pages, then runs a battery of safe tests against each one: does this form let me inject SQL? Does this parameter reflect my input back without escaping it (XSS)? Is there a .env file sitting in a public folder? Are the security headers missing? Is the software behind the site tied to a known CVE? Each answer becomes a finding, ranked by how dangerous it is.

Step 1 — Choose a scanner

You have three broad options:

• Online scanners — quick, but usually shallow and rate-limited, and you're sending your site to a third party.
• Command-line tools — powerful but steep; you assemble and interpret them yourself.
• Desktop scanners — you install one app, point it at your site, and get a readable report. Web Iron Shield is this kind: it runs locally on Windows, so nothing about your site leaves your computer.

Step 2 — Confirm you're allowed to scan it

This matters. Running active security tests against a site you don't own or have written permission to test is illegal in most countries. Only ever scan your own website, or one you've been explicitly authorized to test. Good scanners make you confirm this before they start.

Step 3 — Run your first scan

With Web Iron Shield, this is three fields: your URL, a scan profile (start with the default), and the authorization checkbox. Hit start and the scanner crawls your pages and runs every check in real time — you watch each finding appear live rather than staring at a spinner.

root@webironshield:~$ ./scan --target https://yoursite.com
[00:01] crawling yoursite.com … 48 pages mapped
[00:03] ✓ security headers analyzed
[00:04] ✗ SQL injection — /product?id=
[00:06] ✗ .env exposed — database credentials leaked
[00:07] ! Reflected XSS — /search?q=
[00:11] ✓ scan complete — 4 issues found · score 58/100

Step 4 — Read the results by severity

Don't try to fix everything at once. Every finding gets a severity — CRITICAL HIGH MEDIUM — and you work top-down. A critical SQL injection or an exposed .env full of database credentials is a drop-everything problem. A missing security header is worth fixing, but it won't get you breached this afternoon.

A good report doesn't just name the issue — it tells you where (the exact URL and parameter), why it matters, and how to fix it. Web Iron Shield pairs every finding with a concrete remediation step you can hand to a developer, and lets you export the whole thing to HTML, JSON or CSV.

Step 5 — Fix, then re-scan

Fix the critical and high issues, deploy, and run the scan again. The goal is a clean report — or at least one with no criticals. Re-scanning after each change is how you confirm the fix actually worked and didn't introduce something new.

How often should you scan?

At minimum: after every deployment, whenever you add or update a plugin or dependency, and once a month as a baseline. Attackers don't wait for your quarterly review, and neither should your scans.

What a scan won't do

Be honest about scope. A web vulnerability scanner finds web-application weaknesses — it doesn't secure your cloud infrastructure, monitor network traffic, or audit your source-code dependencies. It's the front door, and the front door is where most attacks start. But it's one layer, not all of them.