How to check your website’s speed and SEO for free (and what the scores mean)

The short answer

You can check your website’s speed and basic SEO for free in about 30 seconds with our free website check. It runs Google’s own PageSpeed test on mobile and desktop, checks 12 SEO basics on your homepage, and explains what to fix first in plain English. You don’t need to sign up to see your scores.

The harder part is knowing what the numbers mean. Below we walk through what gets tested, what a good score looks like, and which problems are worth fixing first.

Why bother checking at all?

Most business owners only look at their website on their own laptop, on fast office Wi-Fi, already knowing where everything is. Your customers don’t. They’re usually on a phone, often on mobile data, and they’ve never seen your site before.

A site can look perfectly fine to you and still be losing enquiries because it’s slow on phones, because Google can’t work out what a page is about, or because a setting is quietly hiding it from search. None of these are visible from the front end. A quick check makes them visible.

It’s also worth checking after any big change: a new theme, a new plugin, a platform move, or a batch of new photos. Problems often sneak in during updates and nobody notices until enquiries drop.

What our free check tests

The check looks at two things: how fast your homepage loads, and whether the SEO basics are in place.

Speed, on mobile and desktop

We run your homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights, the same test Google provides to developers, once for mobile and once for desktop. From that we pull out the measures that matter most to a real visitor:

• How long the main content takes to appear on a phone
• Whether the layout jumps around while loading
• Whether scripts make the page slow to respond to taps
• How much smaller your images could be
• How quickly your server starts responding

12 SEO basics

Then we look at the homepage itself and check the foundations Google relies on:

• A secure connection (HTTPS)
• Nothing telling Google to hide the page
• A page title of a sensible length
• A meta description, the summary that shows under your link
• Exactly one main heading (H1)
• Descriptions (alt text) on your images
• Mobile-friendly display settings
• A sitemap
• A canonical tag, so Google knows which version of a page is the real one
• Business details for Google (schema)
• A link preview image for when people share your site
• The page language

You get an overall score out of 100, separate mobile and desktop speed scores, and every result sorted from most to least urgent.

What the scores mean

Google groups PageSpeed scores into three bands. According to Google’s PageSpeed Insights documentation:

• 90 to 100 is good
• 50 to 89 needs improvement
• Below 50 is poor

Don’t panic if your mobile score is much lower than desktop. That’s normal. The mobile test simulates a mid-range phone on a slower connection, which is deliberately tough. Plenty of successful sites sit in the 60s and 70s on mobile. What matters more is the specific measures underneath.

Our overall score combines mobile speed, desktop speed and the SEO basics, with mobile and SEO weighted most heavily because that’s where most small business sites lose out.

The three numbers worth understanding

Google measures real-world page experience with three Core Web Vitals. Our check focuses on the two that can be tested in a single page load.

How fast the main content appears

This is the time until the biggest thing on the screen, usually your hero image or heading, has loaded. Google’s target is 2.5 seconds or less, and anything over 4 seconds counts as poor. If your site misses this, the usual culprits are oversized images, slow hosting or too many scripts loading first.

Whether the layout jumps around

You’ve probably tried to tap a button on your phone and hit something else because the page moved. That’s layout shift. Google wants a score under 0.1. It’s usually caused by images without set sizes, late-loading banners or pop-ups, or fonts that swap in.

How quickly the page responds

The third vital measures how quickly your page reacts when someone taps or clicks, with a target of 200 milliseconds. This one needs data from real visitors over time, so a one-off test can’t measure it directly. Instead we report how long scripts block the page while it loads, which is the main cause of slow responses. Lots of plugins, chat widgets and tracking tags are the usual reason.

For a deeper look at all three, read our plain English guide to Core Web Vitals.

Why your scores change each time

If you run the check twice and get different numbers, nothing is broken. PageSpeed runs in a simulated environment, and small differences in network conditions and server load shift the score by a few points between runs.

Google also collects real-world data from Chrome users over the previous 28 days, which can differ from a single test. A new or low-traffic site often won’t have enough real-world data yet, which is why a lab test is the most practical starting point for small businesses. Look at the trend and the specific issues rather than chasing an exact number.

What to fix first

Our results are sorted by urgency, and that order is usually the right order to work in. As a rule of thumb:

1. Anything hiding you from Google. A “noindex” tag on your homepage or a missing security certificate outranks everything else.

2. Mobile speed problems. Compressing images is often the single biggest and easiest win.

3. Your main heading, page title and meta description. These shape how Google understands and displays your page, and take minutes to fix.

4. Everything else: alt text, schema, link previews and the rest. They all help, and they add up.

Many of these are quick fixes you can make yourself in Squarespace, Wix, WordPress or Shopify settings. Others, like slow hosting or heavy themes, are harder to change without a rebuild. Our Squarespace SEO guide and free SEO guide cover the do-it-yourself fixes in more detail.

What a quick check can’t tell you

A homepage check is a health check, not a full audit. It won’t tell you:

• How your other pages perform
• Which keywords you rank for, or could
• How you compare with competitors
• Whether your content answers what customers are searching for
• How many other websites link to you

For the competitor question, our competitor comparison runs the same test on your site and a rival’s side by side. For the rest, it’s worth a proper audit. Our technical SEO audit before and after shows what that can uncover on a real site.

Quick checklist

• Run the free check on your homepage
• Note your mobile score, not just desktop
• Fix anything marked high first
• Compress your largest images
• Make sure every page has one clear H1, a title and a description
• Check again after any big website change
• Run it on a competitor to see where you stand