Your site health score is a 0 to 100 number that sums up the technical shape of the pages Site Audit crawled. It's the first thing you see on your Overview, and it's useful for tracking progress over time. This article explains what goes into it, what a good score looks like, and how to raise it.
The short answer
A higher score means fewer and less serious technical issues on your crawled pages. A score in the 90s is healthy for most sites--even when there are issues to resolve. The score tells you about your site's technical health, not your rankings or traffic, so use it alongside your fixes list rather than on its own.
Where to find your score
In SpyFu, open Site Audit and select your project.
Your score appears on the Overview, in the Site Health card, after each crawl.
Next to the score, you'll see how your crawled pages break down:
Pages With issues: pages with at least one issue, even a small notice (most common)
Healthy: pages with no issues
Broken: pages that couldn't load or returned an error
Don't worry if very few pages are "healthy." A page counts as "with issues" if it has even one minor finding, so most real sites have very few fully clean pages. The score reads the site as a whole, so a site can score 94 with almost no pages in the healthy group.
How the score is calculated
The score is built from two things:
Page-level checks. Site Audit checks each crawled page for technical and on-page issues, such as missing titles, broken links, duplicate content and slow load times. More serious issues (errors) count more than minor ones (notices).
Site-level problems. A few problems affect the whole site, like a homepage that returns an error, robots.txt blocking Google, an SSL certificate that's expired or about to, or most pages set to noindex. If any of these are found, they're flagged at the top of your Overview and they lower your score further.
What moves the score
Fixing issues raises it, especially errors and issues that appear on many pages.
New pages with issues can lower it, even if nothing on your existing pages changed.
Changing your crawl settings can move it. Raising the page limit or turning on JavaScript rendering lets Site Audit see more of your site, which may surface new issues (or confirm fixes it couldn't see before).
A site-level problem lowers it right away, and fixing that problem brings it back up on the next crawl.
What the score doesn't measure
The score doesn't measure rankings, traffic, backlinks or content quality as readers see it. A site can score 95 and still struggle to rank, or score 70 and rank well. It's a checkup number for technical health. Your rankings come from showing up for more searches, which is what the fixes list is aimed at.
What's a good site health score?
Use these ranges as general guidance. The best comparison is always your own score over time.
Score | What it usually means | What to do |
90–100 | Healthy. Few serious issues on your crawled pages. | Work through your fixes list and keep crawling on a schedule. |
70–89 | Generally sound, with some issues worth fixing. | Start with errors, then issues that appear on many pages. |
50–69 | Several issues are holding the site back. | Look for template problems that repeat across pages, and fix those first. |
Below 50 | Serious or widespread problems, often including a site-level issue. | Check the top of your Overview for site-level alerts and fix those before anything else. |
A few things to keep in mind:
Don't chase 100. Some issues are notices you may choose to leave alone, and some don't apply to how your site is built.
Compare like with like. A score from a 100-page crawl and a score from a 5,000-page crawl cover different parts of your site. If you report the score, note how many pages it covers.
Different tools score differently. A score from another audit tool uses different checks and weights, so the numbers aren't directly comparable.
How to raise your score
Fix site-level alerts first. Anything flagged at the top of your Overview has the biggest effect on your score and your site.
Publish your auto-fixable issues. Titles, meta descriptions, H1s and social tags come with fixes already written. Review them, edit anything you want, and publish.
Work through errors, then warnings. Each remaining issue comes with a step-by-step guide. You can follow it yourself or hand it off.
Turn on JavaScript rendering if you've installed the Site Audit snippet. Without it, your audit can't see the fixes you've published, and your score won't reflect them. See Turning On JavaScript Rendering for Site Audit.
Re-crawl and watch the trend. Your issue counts trend across your crawls, so you can see progress from one crawl to the next.
Common questions
My score dropped, but I didn't change anything. Why?
Check the top of your Overview for a site-level alert first. If there isn't one, look for new pages (from a plugin, a product import or a new blog post) that brought new issues. Changes to your crawl settings, like a higher page limit, can also move the score.
I fixed issues, but my score didn't go up. Why?
The score updates after your next crawl, so run a new one. If you published fixes through the Site Audit snippet, make sure JavaScript rendering is turned on in Crawl Settings. Without it, the crawler can't see your published fixes.
There are 142 warnings. Is my site broken?
Probably not. That number counts every instance on every page. It usually comes down to a much shorter list of issue types, and many of those can be fixed automatically.
Will a higher score improve my rankings?
Not directly. The score measures technical health. Fixing the underlying issues helps search engines crawl and understand your pages, which supports better rankings, but the score itself isn't a ranking factor.
Can I show this score to a client or my boss?
Yes. Every issue behind the score lists the exact pages affected, so you can show where the number comes from. Note the crawl scope next to the score (for example, "100 of ~600 pages"), or raise the page limit to cover the whole site before you report on it.
Why is my score different from another tool's score?
Every tool uses its own checks and weights. Compare your SpyFu score to your earlier SpyFu scores rather than to another tool's number.