Field Guide

What the Free Website Checkup Actually Tests

By Jerome Bilaos·Technical Web Architect·Updated June 2026

There are a thousand "free website graders" online. Most show you a score, an ad, and a sales call. Mine is honest about what it is: a 12-check technical smoke test that runs live against your page, scores it out of 100 with weighted checks, and shows you the worst issues across distinct areas of your site. It's the first-pass scan behind my full audit — not a watered-down marketing gimmick.

What This Tool Actually Checks

Enter your URL and email. The tool fetches your live HTML (with a byte cap and an 8-second timeout, reading the public page exactly as a visitor or crawler would — it never logs in or edits anything) and runs twelve weighted checks:

HTTPS — is the final URL served securely?
Title tag — present and substantial, not thin or missing.
Meta description — present and at least 30 characters.
Single H1 — exactly one, not zero and not many.
Structured data — any JSON-LD on the page at all.
Mobile viewport — the meta tag that lets the page scale on phones.
Canonical tag — to stop duplicate URLs competing.
Open Graph tags — so shared links render with an image.
Image alt text — flagged if more than 20% of images are missing it.
Language attribute — lang on the <html> element.
H2 headings — at least one, so content isn't one flat block.
llms.txt signal — a reference to the file that guides AI crawlers.

Each check carries a weight (structured data and title are worth the most). Your score is 100 minus the proportion of weight you failed, floored at 20. You land in a band — strong (80+), leaking (60–79), or at risk (under 60). Then it shows your top issues, deliberately pulled from up to five distinct areas, so you see schema, structure, security and social problems rather than five near-duplicates stacked together.

Why This Differs From Other Free Graders

Two things make this honest where most graders aren't.

First, it's weighted and de-duplicated by area. A generic grader will happily list ten variations of the same image problem to pad the report and scare you. This one picks the single worst failure from each distinct category, so the list you see actually spans your site's real problems instead of inflating one of them.

Second, it tests AI-era signals, not just 2015 SEO. The llms.txt check and the structured-data check exist because the audiences that decide whether you get found now include AI assistants, not only Google. Most free checkups still grade you as if rich results and AI answers don't exist. They do, and a page invisible to them is invisible to a fast-growing slice of buyers.

The score isn't theatre. It comes from real weights on real checks against your real HTML — the same engine logic behind the paid audit, just capped to the surface layer.

What You'll See When You Run It

You submit and within seconds get a big number out of 100, a coloured band, and a verdict line naming your host. Below it, your top issues as cards — each with a category tag, a plain-English title, and why it matters. For example:

Schema — "No structured data (schema)": Google and AI can't tell what your business does.
SEO — "Weak or missing title": your strongest on-page signal is thin.
Structure — "Missing or duplicate H1": crawlers can't pin your subject.

If more issues exist than are shown, you get a "+N more" line. The same result is emailed to you so it's on record.

What It Does NOT Do

This is a surface scan of one page, not a full audit. It reads static HTML, so it can't measure real load speed, can't pull your actual Google or Bing search data, and can't tell you the prioritised order to fix things in. A passing 80+ here means the basics are in place — it does not mean your site is fully optimised; "good" still leaks at the deeper layers a quick scan can't reach. The email is required because the report link reaches you that way, and there's one free scan per site per 48 hours to keep it fast for everyone.

Who Should Run This

Anyone who suspects something on their site is quietly costing them enquiries but can't see what, and doesn't want to pay an agency just to find out. It's the right first move before any bigger investment: run it, get the smoke-test read, fix the obvious leaks, then decide whether you need to go deeper.

Run the website checkup for an instant score and your top issues. When you want every check, your real search data, and a ranked fix list — biggest leak first — that's what the complete website audit is for.