Jamie Spurrell
Table of Contents
Our free Website Grader checks five things: site performance, lead capture, SEO basics, trust signals, and conversion path. Run it on your own site and you get a real score in each category, built from your actual data (not a guess), emailed to you as a full report. This piece explains what each category actually means, how to read your score, and what to do next once you have it.
What a website audit actually checks
"Website audit" gets used loosely: some tools mean a 200-point technical SEO crawl, others mean a five-minute speed test. Ours checks five categories, each one a real, common reason a small-business website underperforms.
Site Performance
How fast your site loads, and how stable it feels while it's loading, measured the same way Google measures it, using real Core Web Vitals data rather than a synthetic guess. A page that takes 4+ seconds to show anything useful reads as broken to a visitor, not just slow, and most people bounce before it finishes loading. Speed also compounds: a faster site tends to rank better and convert better, on the same traffic you're already paying to attract.
Full breakdown, including the handful of causes behind most real-world speed problems and the fixes worth doing first: how to improve your website's speed and performance.
Lead Capture
Traffic isn't the goal: inquiries are. This category checks whether your site actually makes it easy to become a customer: a visible contact form, a phone number a mobile visitor can tap instead of retyping, forms that aren't buried three clicks deep. A site that gets visitors but makes it hard to reach the business is losing leads it already paid to attract, whether that payment was ad spend, SEO work, or word of mouth.
Full breakdown of the most common lead-capture gaps and how to close them: how to improve lead capture on your website.
SEO Basics
Before backlinks and content calendars, search engines need the fundamentals just to understand and rank a page correctly: a clear, unique title tag, a real meta description, one H1 per page, descriptive alt text, a working sitemap. This category checks whether those fundamentals are actually in place, not the deeper technical SEO work, just the things that have to be right first.
Full checklist: the SEO basics checklist every small business website needs.
Trust Signals
Whether a visitor believes you before they've spoken to you: real reviews and testimonials attached to real names, HTTPS, a consistent business name/address/phone across the site, case studies with specific results instead of vague claims. This category matters more than it sounds: in BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey, 31% of consumers say they'll only use a business rated 4.5 stars or higher, and 68% won't go below 4.0 at all, before they've read a word of your homepage copy.
Full breakdown, including how to actually get more reviews: the trust signals that actually convert website visitors and why Google reviews matter for small business.
Conversion Path
The route a visitor actually takes from landing on a page to taking action: clicking, calling, filling out a form. Most sites don't design this path deliberately; it's just whatever order the sections happened to get built in. This category checks for the usual breaks: no clear next step, too many competing calls to action, a CTA buried below the fold.
Full breakdown: how to optimize your website's conversion path, including how live chat compares to a contact form for actually capturing the lead once someone's ready to act.
Who this is for (and who it isn't)
It's genuinely worth running for almost any small business: especially if you haven't checked these fundamentals in the last year, you're about to spend money on ads or SEO and want to make sure the site you're sending people to actually converts, or something feels off but you can't point to what. Five minutes and an email address is a low bar for a real, data-backed answer.
It's less useful in a couple of specific cases. If a competent team redesigned your site recently and already reviewed it against these same fundamentals, a free scan will likely just confirm what you already know. And if the decision in front of you isn't really about the website (it's about pricing, positioning, or which services to offer), that's a business-strategy question a site audit, free or paid, isn't built to answer.
Is a free audit accurate, or just a sales pitch?
Both, honestly, in the sense that it's genuinely useful and it's how we introduce ourselves to a business we haven't worked with yet. What makes it accurate: performance is measured against Google's own Core Web Vitals data, not a synthetic estimate, and the other four categories check real, verifiable things on your actual site, not an opinion.
What it isn't: a complete audit. A free automated tool catches the checkable stuff (is HTTPS on, does a title tag exist, does the page load fast), but it can't judge whether your messaging actually resonates with your specific customer, or whether your conversion path makes sense for how your particular business sells. That's the honest limit of any free tool, ours included, and it's worth knowing going in rather than assuming a score is the whole picture.
What a good score vs. a bad score actually means
A high score across all five categories means your site is handling the fundamentals: it's not costing you visitors it should be keeping. It doesn't mean your website can't be improved further; it means the free-tool-catchable problems aren't the thing holding you back, and any further work is more strategic than fix-it-and-forget-it.
A low score in one or two categories, rather than across the board, is normal and usually the more useful result: it tells you specifically where to look first instead of "everything needs work." A site that's fast and well-optimized for search but has no visible contact form, for example, is spending real effort getting people to a page that then fails to convert them. That's a much cheaper fix than it sounds, and knowing exactly where to look is most of the work.
A low score across most or all categories usually means the site was built once, a while ago, and hasn't been revisited since, not a judgment on the business, just a sign the site needs deliberate attention rather than a single quick fix.
Do you need to fix everything a report flags?
No, and treating every flagged item as equally urgent is usually the wrong move. Prioritize fixes that show up in more than one category first (a slow page, for instance, hurts both Site Performance and Conversion Path at once), then whatever's cheapest to fix relative to its impact: image compression and a visible phone number are both quick wins; a full information-architecture rebuild is not. A report is a map, not a to-do list to clear in order.
Free tool vs. hiring someone to audit your site
A free automated tool is the right first step for almost everyone: it's instant, it's specific to your real data, and it costs nothing to run. Where it hits a ceiling is judgment: whether your homepage actually explains what you do clearly enough, whether your conversion path makes sense for how your specific business sells, whether your site has deeper technical or accessibility issues an automated scan won't catch.
That's the gap our own Website Audit service is built to close: a practical, human-reviewed audit covering first impression, mobile experience, conversion path, SEO structure, accessibility, and overall site health, with clear direction on what to fix first and why. It's a reasonable next step once you've run the free Grader and want a second opinion with actual judgment behind it, not a replacement for starting with the free check.
Run your own site through the free Website Grader: it checks all five categories using your real data and emails you the full report. If your score turns out to need more than a quick fix, that's exactly what our Website Audit and website design work are built to handle.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ours checks five things: site performance (speed, Core Web Vitals), lead capture (how easy it is to actually contact you), SEO basics (the fundamentals search engines need to rank a page), trust signals (reviews, HTTPS, consistent business info), and conversion path (whether the site actually guides a visitor to act).
Both. The data behind each score is real and measured against your actual site, but a free automated check has real limits: it catches checkable problems, not judgment calls about messaging or strategy. Treat it as a genuinely useful first step, not a complete audit.
A high score across the board means the free-tool-catchable problems aren't your bottleneck. A low score in one or two specific categories is the most useful result: it tells you exactly where to look first. A low score everywhere usually just means the site hasn't been revisited since launch.
Enter your website URL and it runs immediately: the full report, covering all five categories, gets emailed to you.
No. Start with anything that shows up in more than one category, then whatever's cheapest to fix relative to its impact. A report is a map, not an in-order checklist.
A free tool is instant and specific to your real data, but it can't judge messaging, strategy, or anything that isn't a checkable fact. A human-reviewed audit adds that judgment: a reasonable next step once you've run the free check, not a replacement for it.
