Website analysis online: how to read the report and what to fix

Website analysis online starts after the scan: how to read scores, severities and categories, set priorities and turn a report into a fix list you will finish.

SEO · Published: 14 October 2026 · 6 min read · Ольга Мирошник

Website analysis online does not start when you press the scan button. It starts when the report is already open and you are looking at forty findings, a dozen categories and an overall score of 68. The scanner has collected the facts; turning them into a decision — what to fix today, what next month, what to leave alone — is still your job. (What goes into the report in the first place is covered in website check online.) Here is how to read scores, severities and categories, and how to turn a report into a fix list in half an hour.

A score is a diagnosis, not a grade

Every measured category starts at 100 and loses points for each issue found, weighted by severity and by how many of the crawled pages it appears on. The overall score is the average of the measured categories. Three practical consequences follow:

• Compare the site with itself, not with a competitor. The score measures how well a site meets what the checks expect. Your 82 against their 85 says nothing about who ranks better.
• "Not measured" is not zero. If the pages have no forms, the Forms category gets no invented score and does not pull the average either way.
• The bands are coarse, and that is fine. 90+ excellent, 70–89 good, under 70 needs work.

If the report shows a change since the previous scan, read that first: the trend matters more than the absolute number. The method is described in the help centre.

Severity: broken now versus broken later

Every finding carries one of four levels:

• Critical and high — something already fails for visitors: a dead link, a form with no action, a page answering 500, a certificate about to expire. These are this week's tasks.
• Medium — missing metadata and markup that will cost you later: no canonical, duplicate titles, no Content-Security-Policy.
• Low — notes and observations. Some are deliberate choices (no IPv6, no DNSSEC), and closing them just to see a green tick is optional.

Read severity together with reach. "Pages: 9 of 10" on a medium template issue often matters more than a high issue on one forgotten page. And "whole site" marks a domain-level setting — fixed once in the server or DNS configuration, not page by page.

Categories tell you who gets the ticket

Categories are not just a breakdown of the score; they route the work:

• SEO, HTML, links — the content or SEO person plus the CMS templates. See meta tags and canonical URLs.
• Performance and images — front end plus server or CDN settings: compression, caching, WebP and AVIF.
• Security and infrastructure — the sysadmin or DevOps: headers, TLS, redirects, DNS. Anything marked "whole site" goes here.
• Console, forms, mobile, accessibility — the front-end developer. JavaScript errors often break forms and analytics at once; see console errors.

The SEO diagnostics block deliberately separates findings that look alike but mean different things: noindex on the cart or the search page is marked intentional and not counted as an error, while noindex on a product page is flagged as a mistake.

Setting priorities

A simple scheme that works almost every time:

1. Everything critical and high — immediately, whatever the effort. Visitors are already running into it.
2. Medium issues with wide reach — next. One template edit closes the finding on every page.
3. Quick wins — in parallel. This separate list is ranked by payoff per minute of work; each item carries a time estimate and the pages to change. An hour on the top of it usually moves the score more than a day elsewhere.
4. The rest — into the backlog with a review date.

Also check whether a finding is wrong for your case. Every issue carries the measured values it was raised from: if the numbers are right but the conclusion does not apply to your site, record an exception instead of changing anything.

Common mistakes when reading a report

• Chasing 100. The last few points usually cost more than they return. The target is zero critical and high findings and a steady trend.
• Fixing page by page. The report groups findings by problem, not by address — fix them the same way: template, config, plugin.
• Ignoring the site checks. Domain expiry, SPF and DMARC, the redirect to HTTPS are invisible on the pages and break everything at once.

Analysing a site with SiteScan

1. Run a check from the home page — free, no sign-up.
2. Read "In short, for the site owner": the three most dangerous problems, their reach and a ready fix for your platform.
3. Open Quick Wins and the lowest-scoring category.
4. Press Copy fix brief: the critical, high and medium findings are copied as a Markdown task list sorted by severity and reach, with an acceptance criterion — a task is done when a fresh scan no longer reports it.
5. After the fixes, rescan. "What changed since the last scan" shows what is new, what is fixed and what is still there.

When analysis turns into regular work with a plan and tickets, read about the website audit online.