Your website needs to make top marks to stand out on Google and generate leads with page conversions. With users spending an average of 45 seconds on a webpage, you need the tools to help evaluate your digital content. You can find a website grader anywhere online, so what qualifies as a good resource to help your site reach its peak performance? Learn more about what a free website grader can do for your business’s growth.

What Is a Website Grader?

A website grader helps you to evaluate multiple aspects of your website. As you search for a high-quality resource, you should look for results on:

• On-page SEO optimization
• Off-page backlinks
• Social score
• Performance
• Security
• And more

When you think, “Grade my website,” you want every factor of its overall performance evaluated. Your company’s online presence can suffer from a low or ineffective grader that does not include a comprehensive evaluation.

A better grade for your website means a better experience for your users. You should anticipate improved rank and visibility in search engines, too. A free website grader should be one of many services to expect from a quality marketing agency.

Why You Need a Website Grader

If you want your business to flourish in the digital landscape, you need a performance evaluation of your site. Your business’s success is not marked by web traffic alone. Instead, several other factors impact your site’s presence.

Even stores with a predominantly physical presence invest in a quality website. Although digital directories are a starting point for most, a website ensures far more recognition. One of the unfortunate side effects of everyone switching to virtual storefronts is the oversaturated on search engine results pages.

With all of the technical detail that goes into designing and optimizing a site, how do you have time to run your business online? Even if you only have a virtual storefront, web design and development positions usually require a full-time commitment.

A website grader can show you where to start, without investing too much time or money into fixing any problems you have with web traffic or page performance. When you have a site report, you also have a resource to reference whenever you choose to consult a digital marketing agency.

SEO

When evaluating a website grader, it must include a tool to grade your SEO. A website SEO grader should consist of its own grade, due to the complicated nature of optimizing search engines.

Any feedback you receive, prior to a consultation with a digital marketing agency, should give analyze significant components of SEO. See the following important information about on and off-page factors for SEO strategies.

Keyword Use

Keywords you elect to associate with your company, aside from being well researched, should also correspond with:

• Titles
• Meta description and headings tags
• Page frequency

These are essential factors for individual keywords. If your website grader does not evaluate these elements, you should likely consider another website SEO grader.

You should also receive similar metrics for keyword phrases. These individual and phrasal keywords should be measured against the amount of content on your site.

More content with text usage can thicken your site’s presence in search rankings. Higher text content volumes provide more searchable keyword opportunities to improve rank and visibility.

Page and Domain Authority

External and internal backlinks, as well as referring domains, demonstrate the page and domain authority of your website. A quality website grader shows you the level of backlink activity to the graded webpage.

Your number of external backlinks determines how high your website ranks. The more referring domains that backlink to your site, the more search engine algorithms evaluate your website as credible and influential. Think of it as a backend, third party vote of confidence for your site.

An on-page link structure, usually composed of internal links, helps build authority on your website with optimized keywords that boost the search rank. Your page authority benefits from unbroken links and the logical structure of on-page links.

Image Optimization

Optimized images, another critical part of SEO, should feature in a website grader. Image alt text affects your search rank through image alt text. Also known as alt tags and descriptions, this feature appears in place of animated when a webpage fails to load.

If your website uses images, as most do, your website grader should show you where your images stand for optimization. Specific, sparing keyword and character use are hallmarks of good image alt text.

Title and Meta Tagging

Your HTML header should feature in the SEO portion of a website grader. It should evaluate title tags or the number of characters used in the tagline of evaluated webpages. The optimal length for characters ranges between 10 and 70.

Your meta description appears in search engines as text users see to understand your site. Ranging from 70 and 320 characters for optimal length, your meta description tag should feature SEO for services your company provides.

Other Content

Your website grader should also evaluate external resources that affect SEO. For example, if you use an analytics tool like Google Analytics, the grader should confirm as such.

As for backend content like XML sitemaps, your website grade report should verify whether you have a sitemap or not.

Usability

When assessing the usability of your website, a free website grader of quality evaluates mobile optimization and other visual elements. Your site’s usability is measured by its appearance across devices. Maximizing usability allows you to reach your audience and minimize user bounce rate.

A visual check of your website can confirm device rendering, or how your page renders across different types of devices. With more and more search engine use occurring on mobile and tablets, an optimized website can capitalize on the majority of today’s web traffic.

When a website grader assesses usability, it should also look for:

• Use of mobile viewports (matching device size)
• Existing use of Flash content
• Use of iFrames
• Existence of a specified favicon
• Legible font sizes
• Tap target sizing (link or button sizing)

The inclusion of these features on your website should increase your grade and appearance in search rank.

Performance

Performance depends on loading page time and responsiveness of your website for users. A website with poor responsivity and long loading times does not rank well when searched. Google’s search engine algorithms can drop your rank if your website grader does not evaluate performance.

Good user experience on your website can change from periodic fluctuations. Monitoring performance on a consistent basis helps your website’s performance grade.

Speed and Size

Your page speed needs to be high, with low loading times to improve user experience. A good website grader evaluates server response, if all page content loads, and the completion of all page scripts.

Page size determines loading times and impacts your page speed. If your page’s file size is low, your page load speed increases.

Number of Resources

The number of resources on a webpage correlates to the number of files retrieved from web servers to load your page. A website grader checks the number of resources on your webpage to evaluate page load speed and time. Resource types include:

• HTML pages
• JavaScript resources
• CSS resources
• Images
• Other resources

The more files you have, the higher your page load time. You can fix this by removing extra files and consolidating similar file types.

Other Elements

A website grader evaluates performance beyond page load speed. It also assesses image optimization, minification of JavaScript and CSS files, inline styles, and deprecated HTML. Inline styles degrade page performance and complicate HTML.

Social Score

A website grader’s evaluation of your site’s social score shows the social activity present. A high social score reflects your digital connectedness and ability to communicate with customers. It also shows your ability to bring customers to your website with brand awareness and multichannel marketing campaigns.

Your website’s evaluation should include connectivity checks on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and LinkedIn. Your activity on each fo these sites should appear as well (e.g., subscribers or followers).

Security

Site security matters. If your website grader does not evaluate this aspect of your website, you need to look elsewhere for assessment. You want your user data protected, and a secure site ensures this. A compromised website produces potential data loss.

Like performance, you should assess your site’s security regularly. You can maintain a secure page with ongoing patches and protective monitoring tools.

Your website grader should show you whether your site’s SSL is enabled or not. This should include a check on HTTPS redirect to SSL secure versions.

You should also receive a score for any malware services you use and the email privacy of your users. If you have a low score on email privacy, consider removing plain text email addresses to deter scrapers and scammers.

What to Do After You Use a Website Grader

Now that you can adequately evaluate a quality website grader, you must take specific follow-up steps after you receive your first score. These steps are important to ensure you get the most out of your site’s evaluation.

1. Review

You need to review each section of your website grade report thoroughly. A good report might offer recommendations to make your action steps clearer. Without a thorough review of the good (and bad) parts of your performance check, you might easily overlook a fixable flaw.

Upon review of your report, do not hesitate to consult with an expert digital marketing company. They should be more than capable of assisting with any backend coding, security issues, or other web development areas.

2. Narrow It Down

Depending on the score from our free website grader, you may feel overwhelmed. If you ended up with a low rating, do not worry. Narrow down the most critical updates by consulting an expert.

You can implement some recommendations in-house, while others may require consulting an external marketing agency. A real professional will advise you to start with editing your meta description first.

3. Test It Again

After you apply the recommendation for your website, you should perform another test on your site. To determine successful implementation, you should re-test.

Once you run your site through the website grader, take the same steps. Review the report, comparing it to the previous one. Methodically narrow down which recommendations for improvement changed (or did not). Apply the necessary changes and re-test again, if needed.

4. Schedule

If you find yourself overwhelmed with this rinse and repeat process, consider setting an optimization schedule. You may not have the required skills or expertise for optimizing your site, but structuring the needed improvements can help you get started.

Once you being implementing these processes, you now have time to clearly communicate your needs to any experts you may consult.

Where to Get Your Free Website Grader

With the skills and knowledge you now possess on evaluating and using a website grader, you just need to know where to find one.

Often, when you think of a free tool, you may not think of a quality one. Any digital marketing agency can claim good, reliable tools. At ROI Amplified, we offer our website grader for free because we want your business to grow.

We offer a free tool like this so you can start a conversation about strengthening your business as a whole. With our experience and your drive, your site is sure to go far after one audit. Contact us today to get started on making your business better.