Website analysis: what the numbers actually mean

Most people do not know whether their website is good. They know whether it is pretty. Those are two different questions, and only one of them can be measured.

A website analysis makes the measurable part measurable: how long the site takes to become usable, how it behaves on a phone, whether it can be read by everyone, whether search engines can see it, and whether it is protected against what actually happens online. No taste, no opinions. Numbers you can check again in a month.

Why analyse a website at all?

Because a website stops working without saying so. Nothing crashes. There is no error message. The site looks the way it always has, and then the phone just rings a little less often than last year.

There are four reasons it is worth half an hour:

• You do not see what the customer sees. Your browser has the site cached, you are on the office network, and you know the menu by heart. A first-time visitor on a phone with weak coverage has a completely different experience.
• Google measures it anyway. Speed and mobile experience affect where you land in search. That is not an opinion, it is part of the ranking.
• Security decays on its own. A certificate expires. An email protection stays stuck on monitoring. Nobody did anything wrong, time simply passed.
• Without a number from before, you cannot know whether a change helped. This is the important one. If you do not measure first, every improvement becomes a hunch.

What a website analysis actually measures

It is worth being precise here, because "analysis" is used for two entirely different examinations that answer different questions:

That is why we have two tools rather than one. To see speed, mobile, accessibility and visibility, run a free website analysis. To see what is exposed from the outside, run a free security check. Both are free, both take under a minute, and neither one touches your website.

Speed: what the numbers mean

The speed analysis gives you four scores from 0 to 100. They are useful, but only if you know what they actually describe.

• Performance is how long it takes before the site is usable, not before it has finished loading. Under 50 is poor, 50 to 89 is middling, 90 and above is good.
• Accessibility is whether the site can be used by everyone: contrast, text size, keyboard navigation, screen readers.
• Best practices is whether the site is built the way browsers expect today.
• SEO is whether Google can read and understand the page at all. That is not the same as ranking well, but without it you do not rank.

Behind the performance score sit three measurements Google calls Core Web Vitals: how quickly the main content appears, how quickly the page responds to the first tap, and whether the content jumps around while loading. This article explains what the numbers mean. To fix them, each of the three has its own recipe in Core Web Vitals explained, and the business side of it in why a slow website loses you customers.

Security: what gets checked from the outside

The security check looks at the site the way a stranger does, without logging in and without trying anything. It answers four questions:

1. Is the traffic encrypted properly? A valid certificate, modern TLS, and HTTP actually being sent on to HTTPS.
2. Does the server say what the browser is allowed to do? Those are the security headers, among them HSTS and a policy for which scripts may run.
3. Can anyone send email in your name? SPF, DKIM and DMARC. This is the part people most often do not know they have.
4. Is anything left lying around? Old test servers, admin panels and subdomains nobody has looked at since they were set up.

The report says what was found, where it is, and who fixes it. To see your own, take a security check of your website. Note that everything above is the outside, meaning what a stranger can see without logging in. The inside is a different job: passwords, backups, old plugins and what to do if something has happened. That checklist is in web security for businesses.

How to read the result: what to fix first

A report with twenty items is useless if everything looks equally important. This is the order that holds:

1. Anything outright broken. An expired certificate, the site not responding on mobile, Google unable to read it.
2. Anything costing you customers today. Mobile performance under 50, a form that does not work, contact details that are not there.
3. Anything protecting your name. The email protections, meaning SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Cheap to fix, expensive to ignore.
4. The rest. Small points that look tidy in a report and are noticed by nobody.

What an analysis does not tell you

This rarely gets said, so we will say it: an analysis measures what can be measured from the outside. It cannot see whether your text convinces anyone, whether the price is right, whether the images look like your business, or whether the form asks for something the customer is willing to give.

Nor can it see the inside. A passive check does not find a weak password, an old plugin with a known hole, or a database with no backup.

So 100 out of 100 does not mean the site sells. It means nothing technical is in the way. That is a good place to start, not a certificate.

How often should you check?

• Speed: every time the site changes. A new front page, new images, a new tracking script. That is where the numbers fall.
• Security: every three months. Certificates and DNS records expire on their own schedule, without anyone doing anything.
• Both: before you buy advertising. It is expensive to send paid traffic to a page that takes seven seconds on a phone.

What should happen between the checks is collected in website maintenance.

If you just want to see your own numbers, take a free website analysis or a free security check. If you want someone to fix what turns up, websites for businesses are what we build, and we go through the report with you first.