Grade your website

A website grader loads a live page and measures the things visitors and search engines actually react to, then reports it as a single number with the evidence behind it. The distinction worth knowing is that many free graders infer a score from your domain or your industry. This one fetches your page, reads the response your server sends a browser, and runs Google’s own mobile audit against it, which is why it takes about 40 seconds rather than answering instantly.

Most owners see their own site the same way every day: on a desktop, on office wifi, on a browser that has already cached half of it. That view hides almost everything that costs you enquiries. Grading puts the site in front of you the way a stranger on a phone meets it, and turns vague worry about whether the website is doing its job into a list of specific, fixable items.

A visitor decides whether your business looks capable while the page is still loading, long before reading a word about what you do. Speed is also a ranking signal Google publishes openly, so a slow site pays twice: fewer people find it, and fewer of those who do stay long enough to contact you. Performance here is measured on a simulated phone over a throttled connection, because that is the condition most of your visitors are actually in.

The technical foundations a search engine reads before it decides what your page is about. This check covers your page title and search description, whether there is exactly one main heading, whether you are accidentally blocking search engines, a declared canonical URL, how the page looks when shared on social media, structured data for rich results, and a declared page language. None of it is about keywords or content quality. It is about whether a search engine can understand and present the page at all.

Start with the mechanical items above, because they are cheap, measurable, and often a single day of work. A missing description or a page quietly blocking crawlers can hold back a site that is otherwise fine. After that the work is slower and ongoing: pages that answer what your customers actually search for, a site structure that makes sense to a person, and earning links from places that matter in your industry. Anyone promising rankings without that second half is selling you the first half twice.

They are the instructions your site gives a visitor’s browser about how to protect them, and most small business sites have never had them set. Without HTTPS, Chrome puts a "Not secure" warning in front of visitors before they read anything. Without headers like HSTS, a content security policy, and clickjacking protection, the browser has no instruction to fall back on. This category is weighted hardest in the grade because it is the most consequential thing measurable from outside a site, and the one an owner is least likely to know about.

Accessibility is whether someone using a screen reader, a keyboard, or a zoomed-in phone can still use your site. The checks here cover alt text on images, labelled form fields, landmark regions, a declared page language, and whether zoom has been blocked. Roughly one in five people has a disability that affects how they use the web, so this is a real share of your market. The same markup that helps a screen reader also helps a search engine, and accessibility is becoming a legal expectation in more places every year.

Above 4.2 means the site is in good shape, and if enquiries are still thin the constraint is traffic rather than the website. Between 2.8 and 4.2 means the fundamentals are there with real gaps, usually in one category that is quietly holding back the rest. Below 2.8 means visitors are feeling problems they could not name if you asked them. The grade is out of 5 rather than 100 on purpose: it is meant to tell you whether a category is fine, shaky, or costing you, and the checks underneath tell you why.