Free website checker tools: what the score misses

A free website checker reads your pages the way a search engine does: the code, the headings, load times, links and the security certificate. That’s useful. What a typical free checker can’t do is confirm that your contact form actually delivers enquiries, or tell you whether your site could be restored if it broke tonight.

In the last week of October I ran two site audits on otta.ie. The first tool gave the site a health score of 96 out of 100 (its own score, not Google’s). The second found that the meta description of my contact page, the text Google may show under the link in search results, was a line of CSS code: /* CONTACT CARD ACTIONS */. The 96 gave no hint of that. And neither tool could tell me whether my contact form works.

Here is what free checkers do well, where the score misleads, and what you have to check yourself.

What free website checkers are good at

They’re good at anything that can be measured from outside, without logging in:

• pages that return errors or redirect in circles
• missing or duplicate page titles and meta descriptions
• images far bigger than they need to be
• load time and server response time
• an expired or missing security certificate (the padlock in the browser)
• pages Google can’t index because of a setting

Two free tools from Google cover most of this for a small business. PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) tests one page at a time on a simulated phone. Google Search Console shows which of your pages are indexed and which searches your site appeared in. Search Console needs a one-off verification of your domain, and after that it costs nothing. If your site doesn’t show up at all, start with why your business website is not showing on Google.

One thing to know about PageSpeed Insights: the coloured score at the top comes from a lab test. Below it, the tool may show real-world data from Chrome users, but only when enough people visit. If the page itself doesn’t have enough visitors, Google may show figures for your whole domain instead. Many small business sites don’t have enough for either, and then you only see the lab result. More on reading those numbers in how fast a small business website should load.

Where the score misleads

A score adds up dozens of checks and weights them in ways you don’t see. Two things go wrong with that.

Real problems get averaged away. The 96 for otta.ie came with one warning worth looking at: on 77 of 91 pages the server took longer than half a second to respond. The second audit showed the pattern. Pages already in the cache responded in 140 to 280 milliseconds. All the others took between 0.9 and 2.4 seconds, because WordPress had to build them first. I measured a few of those pages again myself: 1.1 to 1.6 seconds to build, around 0.1 to 0.25 seconds once cached. So the first visitor to arrive on an uncached page waits more than a second. The usual fix is to preload the cache, so pages are ready before anyone asks for them. I’m still checking how reliably that works on this site, because preloaded pages only help if nothing deletes them again. A score of 96 didn’t make any of this look urgent.

False alarms look serious. The same audit flagged a “404 not found” response. It came from a link the site creates to hide email addresses from spam bots, which crawlers can’t open. When I checked it, it wasn’t a page any visitor needed, so there was nothing to fix. A few days earlier an SEO tool emailed me that my visibility had dropped by 100%. The tool was tracking one search term, “otta”, which belongs to a well-known jobs platform that used that name. My site had never ranked for it.

None of this is the tools’ fault. But if you run a business and don’t read audit reports for a living, a red warning and a green 96 are both easy to misread.

What a free checker can’t tell you

These are the things I’d look at on any small business website. Paid monitoring tools can cover some of them, for example by sending test messages through a form. A free scan of your pages covers none of them. For a longer routine, see how to check whether your business website is actually working.

Whether enquiries reach you

A checker sees that the form exists. It doesn’t know where the messages go. Send a test enquiry from an email address that isn’t your business one, then check the inbox and the spam folder of the address the form sends to. If you’re not sure which address that is, that’s your first finding. Why WordPress contact forms stop sending emails covers the usual causes.

Whether a visitor understands what you do

Open your homepage on your phone and read only what’s on the screen before you scroll. Does it say what you do and which area you cover? A checker counts words and headings. It can’t tell you whether the headline makes sense to a customer. What makes a small business website trustworthy goes through the details visitors look for.

Whether the details are still right

Opening hours, prices, a staff member who left two years ago. A crawler reads this text but has no way of knowing it’s out of date. Tap the phone number on your phone. Does it dial, and does someone answer?

Whether you could restore the site

A checker can sometimes see which WordPress version you run. It can’t see whether a backup exists, where it’s stored, or whether anyone has ever restored it. Ask whoever looks after your site when the last backup was made and when one was last tested. A copy of the files is not the same thing, as I explain in why copying files is not a tested backup.

Who holds the keys

Who is the domain registered to? Who has the admin login for the website and for the hosting account? If the answer is “the person who built it” and you can’t reach that person, no scan will warn you. The website handover checklist lists what you should have in your own hands, and what to do if your web designer disappeared covers getting it back.

How to use a free checker without chasing points

Run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and on the page that brings in most enquiries. Look first at what affects visitors: very slow loading on mobile, pages that don’t load, missing HTTPS. Leave the cosmetic warnings for later. My own Dundalk page has a 64-character title, and the audit flags it as too long. That alone isn’t a reason to rewrite a page title that works.

Then open the Pages report in Search Console and look for pages that should be indexed and aren’t.

If you change something, run the same tool on the same page again. Comparing scores between different tools tells you very little, because each one counts different things.

Checking the parts the tools miss

The free OTTA Website Health Check covers the side a crawler can’t see. It’s 25 questions about your own site in five areas: clarity and trust, mobile and usability, contact and conversion, SEO and visibility basics, and security and maintenance. You answer from what you know. Nobody logs into your site, and you don’t need to give an email address. It takes about 5 minutes. At the end you get a score for each area and a list of what to fix first, as a PDF you can keep or pass on to whoever looks after your website.

Use a free checker for the technical side and the Health Check for the rest.

Start the free Website Health Check