Probably the most popular website grading tool available for the mass would be Website Grader from Hubspot. Personally I really like this tool a lot but from what I observed so far, quite often people use the tool without having proper understanding of what it actually does.
Scores Don’t Matter
Scoring high marks on such sites doesn’t mean that you have a good website. It just shows you meet their criteria of judging that’s configured into the system and that’s it. The system judges based on what it could see from your site and grade it accordingly.
Please keep in mind that while such sites check on the details it loads from the site, it doesn’t actually check on.
Such tools can’t tell you
- how user friendly are the placement of your contents and whether it’s in any way irritating or difficult to navigate around.
- how well is your color usage.
- how well you use set your fonts.
- how well are your image usage and optimization.
- how well is your loading time.
- whether your site complies to W3C standards.
- what crap / nonsense widget you put.
- in detail on how well is your SEO implementation.
So Should I Avoid Such Tools
NO! Not at all, in fact you SHOULD use them.
In the case of Website Grader from Hubspot, you’ll see that while the name says “Website Grader”, it’s actually a “Website SEO Grader”. So it’s basically a free means for you to find out how well you’re doing with your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and more.
While scoring high marks on such sites doesn’t mean that you have a good website, it surely meant something, it means that you have achieved something that the system is judging you on. For example, here’s a report for goldfries.com.
Read The Report, Ignore The Score
In my opinion, the most important part of the entire process comes down to the report. The report tells you details that you could use to maintain or improve on your site. The score on the other hand, it’s just often a bragging right. Like what I mentioned earlier, it tells you how your site fares based on the criterias given but in no way does it tell you how good your site is.
That is so true. People are just too worked up on scores. It the same with game reviews(or any other review for that matter). People miss the point and don’t understand the actual pros and cons of something just by looking at a score.
wow thanks for letting me know about the service.
i will give it a try later!
@frags – yes. high scores doesn’t mean it’s the end of everything. there’s more to it on websites.
@joshua – good. have fun trying!
I have been using the website grader for a few weeks, and love to not only check my sites, but those that are competing against mine to see where I can improve, and where they’re lacking. It’s a great tool!
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