How to Read Your Website Audit Report: What Your Scores Actually Mean
If you just ran our free audit, you got an email with several scores and a list of findings, and it can look like a lot at once. This isn't marketing copy about your site - it's the actual output of a Lighthouse audit, the same tool Google's own engineers use to evaluate pages. Here's what each number is really measuring, what counts as good, and how to know which item on the list to fix first.
The scores
Every report has up to four scores, each on a scale of 0-100. They measure completely different things about your site, so it's normal to be strong in one and weak in another - a site can load fast and still have SEO gaps, or rank fine and still fail basic accessibility checks.
Performance
How fast your page actually becomes usable to a real visitor: how quickly the main content appears, how quickly the page responds when someone taps a button, and whether things shift around on screen while images and fonts finish loading. It's measured on a simulated mobile connection on purpose - most local-business traffic is on a phone, often on cellular, not the fast wifi your office uses when you check your own site. See our Core Web Vitals explainer for what each of these sub-measurements means on its own.
Accessibility
Whether your site actually works for visitors using a screen reader, navigating by keyboard only, or who need stronger color contrast to read your text comfortably. This covers things like image alt text, labeled form fields, color contrast, and whether keyboard Tab order follows a predictable path instead of jumping around the page. The same fixes that help a screen-reader user also make the site easier to use for everyone else, and they reduce your exposure to ADA-complaint legal risk, which is a real and growing cost for small business sites. Our ADA/accessibility basics guide covers this category in more depth.
SEO foundations
The technical basics that let Google crawl, understand, and index your page at all: a proper title and description, a mobile-friendly viewport, working internal links, crawlable content instead of content Google can't see. This is a foundations check, not a ranking prediction - a perfect score here doesn't guarantee page one, but a low score means Google may be struggling to read your page correctly in the first place, which no amount of good content can fix on its own.
Security & best practices
Baseline security and browser-standard hygiene for your site, most commonly whether it's actually served over HTTPS - the single most common issue this category flags, and one that also affects how browsers and search engines treat your site. If your report doesn't show this fourth score, it just means your latest audit ran before we started tracking this category; re-run the free audit to get it.
What "Good," "Fair," and "Poor" actually mean
Each score in your report is labeled with a verdict, using our own verdict bands (slightly stricter than Lighthouse's default color-coding):
90-100 Good
No meaningful action needed in that category. This is the bar we hold our own site to.
60-89 Fair - room to improve
Functional, but leaving something on the table. Usually a handful of specific, fixable issues rather than a fundamental problem.
0-59 Poor - needs attention
A real problem that's actively costing you visitors, customers, or search visibility, not just a nice-to-have polish item.
How to read the findings list
Below your scores, your report lists specific findings - the actual issues found on your actual site, not generic advice. Each one has three parts:
The issue
What's wrong, in plain English - not a raw Lighthouse audit ID or a technical error code.
The evidence
The specific proof from your site: a file size, a load time, an element that's missing a label. This is what makes it a finding instead of a guess - you can go check it yourself.
The fix
What actually needs to change to resolve it.
Findings are listed in impact order and tagged High impact or Medium impact, so the very first item in your report is the single biggest thing hurting your site right now. If you're only going to fix one thing, that's the one - it's exactly what our $149 Quick Fix targets, and it's why the pricing card on your report names that specific issue instead of a generic "we'll fix stuff" pitch. Prefer to clear the whole list in one pass instead of one finding at a time? That's what the $299 Full Tune-Up is for - every finding in the report fixed, with a before/after re-audit included.
If you get re-audited
If we fix something for you, or you fix it yourself and ask us to re-check, your report becomes a before/after: each score shows what it was previously next to what it is now, and resolved findings are marked as such instead of just disappearing. That's the same before/after proof included with every paid fix, and the same live-progress format we use to track our own case-study clients in public. One caveat worth knowing before you compare numbers: Performance is measured from a single timed page load and varies by several points run to run, so treat a change under about 10 points as measurement noise rather than a real regression. Accessibility, SEO foundations, and Security & best practices are checklist-style checks and only move when the page actually changes.
Frequently asked questions
What's a good score on a website audit?
90 or above is good, 60-89 is fair (room to improve), and below 60 is poor and needs attention. We set the fair/poor line a bit stricter than Lighthouse's own default color bands, so a "good" score here means real, no-caveats good, not just barely-passing.
What does the Performance score measure?
How fast your page becomes usable for a real visitor: how quickly the biggest visible content appears, how quickly it responds to a tap or click, and whether the layout jumps around while it loads. It's measured on a simulated mobile connection, because most local-business traffic is mobile, and mobile connections are slower and less forgiving than the office wifi your site probably looks fine on.
What does the Accessibility score measure?
Whether your site works for visitors using a screen reader, keyboard-only navigation, or who need higher color contrast to read your text - things like image alt text, form field labels, color contrast, and a predictable keyboard Tab order. It also matters for every visitor: the same fixes that help someone using a screen reader make the site easier to use for everyone, and reduce ADA-complaint legal exposure.
What does the SEO foundations score measure?
The technical basics that let Google understand and rank your page at all: a proper title and meta description, a mobile-friendly viewport, valid links, crawlable content. It is not a ranking prediction or a guarantee of a page-one spot - it only measures whether the technical foundation is in place. Good SEO foundations are necessary but not sufficient for good rankings; content and backlinks matter too.
What does the Security & best practices score measure?
Baseline security and browser-standard hygiene issues - most commonly whether your site is served over HTTPS at all, which is the single highest-impact item in this category and the one our findings most often flag. A low score here isn't about your business practices; it's specific, fixable technical issues the same audit tooling can point to directly.
Which finding should I fix first?
Start at the top. Findings are listed in impact order, with the highest-impact issue first and tagged "High impact" or "Medium impact," so the first item in your report is the single biggest thing hurting your site. If you can only fix one thing, that's the one - and it's exactly what the $149 Quick Fix targets. Want everything in the report fixed at once instead of just the top item? That's the $299 Full Tune-Up.
Don't have a report yet?
Run the free audit below. We check your site's speed, accessibility, SEO foundations, and baseline security with Google's own tooling and email you a plain-English report of exactly what's fixable and how, no obligation to buy anything.