How is Website Score calculated

What is Website Score

Website Score is the internal metric that we use in Site Audit. It helps to measure the technical excellence in terms of the SEO of a website. It can be really helpful for tracking the progress you make with Sitechecker and the impact of fixing the errors found.

How is the Website Score calculated?

To make a long story short, a website score can be described as a ratio between the issues and the quantity of all the pages on your website. However, let us deep-dive into it.

We use the following formula to calculate this metric.

Website Score = (sum OnePageScore) / # of pages - cost of Site Level issues. 

OnePageScore = 100 - the cost of critical error one - the cost of critical error two - cost of warning one … and so on.

Cost of specific critical error = (60 * # of specific errors) / # of all critical errors

Cost of specific warning = (40 * # of specific warnings) / # of all warnings

Cost of Site Level issues is simple and fixed: 3 points for each issue marked in red color and 2 points for yellow ones. 

Note! OnePageScore is a hidden metric and you can't find it in the app now.

Let's dive into each element of the formula.

Website Score is an average score across all website pages. By default, each page has 100 points. And we deduct the cost of each error from those 100 points. 

Though the cost of Site Level issues are fixed, the cost of criticals and warnings aren't the same for all websites. It is calculated for each new crawl and depends on 2 factors:

• type of error (critical or warning).
• how often a specific error occurs on the site. 

Critical errors take more points than Warnings. Popular errors take more points than rare errors. Notices and Opportunities have no impact on Website Score.

We use index 60 for critical errors and index 40 for warnings to give more weight to critical errors.

Quick example

Sitecheckerbot crawled a website and detected 45 pages. 

There were the following errors detected:

• Critical errors: 4 Redirect chains, 6 Title is missing. In general 10 critical errors.
• Warnings: 5 4xx client errors, 15 H1 duplicates, 30 Description duplicates. In general 50 warnings.

So, the cost of each error is following:

• Cost of Redirect chains = (60 * 4) / 10 = 24
• Cost of Title is missing = (60 * 6) / 10 = 36
• Cost of 4xx client errors = (40 * 5) / 50 = 4
• Cost of H1 duplicates = (40 * 15) / 50 = 12
• Cost of Description duplicates = (40 * 30) / 50 = 24

Now let us calculate OnePageScore for each page.

For example, page has critical error Title is missing and warnings H1 duplicates and Description duplicates. OnePageScore for this page is following. 

OnePageScore = 100 - 36 - 12 - 24 = 28 

After this, we will need to sum all the OnPageScores and divide them by the total number of pages, including ones without any issues, and deduct the cost of Site Level issues. This way we will get our website score.

Thank you for reading the article. If you still have questions, feel free to contact us at support@sitechecker.pro.