What is a website health score?

Every audit tool hands you a number out of 100. Run your site through three of them and you will get three different numbers, sometimes twenty points apart. That is not a flaw in any of the tools. It is a warning about what the number actually is.

What a health score is

A health score is a summary of the checks that tool ran, weighted by how important that tool's authors think each check is. Nothing more.

Unpack that and three things follow.

It depends on which checks ran. A tool that tests forty things and a tool that tests twelve are not producing comparable numbers, even if both call the result "out of 100".

It depends on someone's opinion of severity. Is a missing meta description worth the same as a noindex tag on your homepage? Obviously not — one is a missed opportunity and the other removes you from Google. But the weighting is a judgement call, and different tools make it differently.

It depends on how much was checked. A score from ten pages and a score from every page on a 300-page site mean different things. The first is a sample.

What a health score is not

It is not a ranking prediction. There is no relationship between an audit score and your position in search results. A site can score 98 and rank nowhere because three better-established competitors have been answering that question for a decade. A site can score 61 and rank first because it is genuinely the best answer and everybody links to it.

It is not a grade on your website. A score reflects a set of technical checks, not whether the site sells anything, explains anything, or looks like it belongs to a business worth hiring.

And it is not comparable between tools. Screenshots of a competitor's score from a different tool are not evidence of anything.

So what is it good for?

Two things, both genuinely useful.

Movement over time on the same tool. This is the real value. If your score was 54 in January and 78 in April on the same tool checking the same site, something improved, and you can see exactly which findings cleared. The absolute number is arbitrary; the direction is not.

Triage. A score below about 50 usually means something structural is wrong — a site blocked from search, a certificate problem, wholesale missing metadata. A score in the 80s usually means the site is basically sound and what remains is housekeeping. That is a useful thing to know in ten seconds.

How to read one properly

Ignore the number and read three other things instead.

How many checks ran, out of how many. If a tool tested 19 of 24 checks, the five it skipped are not passes. They are unknowns, and a good report says which. A score built on partial coverage that presents itself as complete is the single most misleading thing in this category.

How many pages were covered. Ten pages out of 250 is a sample, and the problems on small-business sites tend to live in the pages nobody has opened since they were created.

The severity breakdown. One critical finding matters more than fourteen low ones. A site with a single critical issue and a score of 70 needs urgent attention; a site with thirty low-priority suggestions and the same score needs an afternoon, eventually.

How SEOPert does it

Worth stating plainly, since this article is on a site that gives out scores.

SEOPert scores six categories separately — SEO, technical, performance, content, security and accessibility — and each category score reflects only the checks that actually ran on your report. If Google PageSpeed was unavailable when your audit ran, the performance score says so rather than quietly counting it as a pass.

Security and accessibility are labelled as basic automated samples, because that is what they are. An automated accessibility check catches roughly a third of the barriers real people encounter. Calling that an accessibility score without qualification would be dishonest.

Suggestions do not lower your score. If the only thing we found is optional, the number should reflect a healthy site, not punish you for declining an optional extra.

The methodology page lists the weightings in full, and our own score is published and updated automatically — including when it drops.