How healthy
is your website?

What this checkup measures

Two things happen when you press the button. First, your site goes through Google's PageSpeed engine, the same lab test behind Lighthouse. It loads the page on a simulated device and scores performance, SEO and accessibility out of 100, along with three timing measurements: how long the largest piece of content takes to appear, how much the layout jumps around while loading, and how long scripts block the page from responding. That is lab data, a controlled test rather than your real visitors, so treat the numbers as a strong signal rather than a verdict.

Second, the checkup fetches your page directly and runs nine plain checks: the title tag, the meta description, the main heading, the canonical link, the mobile viewport, Open Graph tags, structured data, robots.txt and the sitemap. These are the basics that search engines, and increasingly AI assistants, read before anything else. I have written up how AI search reads your website if you want the longer version. If Google's test times out, you still get all nine checks and the scores simply show as not measured.

What it cannot see matters just as much. It tests one page, not your whole site. It cannot tell you whether your copy persuades anyone, whether the design looks credible next to your competitors, or whether the site brings you work. Automated checks are a starting point, not an audit, and any tool that claims otherwise is overselling.

What to do with a bad score

First, do not panic. A low score is not a verdict on your business, and most websites fail at least something here. Work through the fails before the warns. Some of them, like a missing title tag or meta description, take minutes to fix in most website editors, and if the content itself is the gap, my guide to preparing content for your website covers what good looks like.

Performance is usually the stubborn one. A slow score rarely comes from one mistake; it comes from the platform, the theme and years of accumulated plugins, which is why patching it often costs more effort than it saves. Past a certain point the honest answer is to build well instead. Every site I build passes Core Web Vitals before it launches, bespoke builds start from £2,500, and a typical marketing site takes around three weeks. The full breakdown lives on the pricing page, and if you are weighing up repair against rebuild, what a website costs in the UK gives you the wider market picture.

And if the scores are good, keep them that way. Sites drift as content, plugins and browsers change, which is what website maintenance is actually for.