Which website checker do you actually need?
Three kinds of tool get called “website checkers” and they answer different questions. This page says which is which, including where we are the wrong choice.
| What you want to know | SiteScore | Lighthouse / PageSpeed | SEO suites |
|---|---|---|---|
| What a visitor reacts to clear next step, trust signals, does it survive a phone | yes | — | — |
| Loading speed and Core Web Vitals | yes | yes | yes |
| Accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA) | yes | yes | — |
| Security headers and certificate | yes | — | yes |
| Whether AI assistants can read and cite you | yes | — | — |
| Pictures of what the page looks like, desktop and phone | yes | — | — |
| A plain sentence you can paste to your developer | yes | — | — |
| Deep crawl of hundreds of pages | — | — | yes |
| Keyword rankings and backlinks | — | — | yes |
| No install, no account, no card | yes | yes | — |
“SEO suites” means the crawling platforms built for agencies. We deliberately do not list prices here: they change, and a number about someone else's product going stale on our page would be our problem.
Questions people ask
Is there a free alternative to Lighthouse for non-developers?
SiteScore is one. Lighthouse is superb and free, but it is written for developers: it reports on things like render-blocking resources and total blocking time. SiteScore opens your page in the same kind of real browser and answers the questions a business owner actually has — is there a clear next step, does the site look like a real business, does it survive a phone, can the text be read. Speed is one of our ten angles; the other nine are what Lighthouse does not ask.
How is SiteScore different from Google PageSpeed Insights?
PageSpeed measures how fast a page loads, very well. SiteScore measures ten angles of which speed is one, and hands you each finding as a sentence you can paste into an email to whoever maintains your site, with an estimate of how long the fix takes and whether it is your job or your developer's.
Do I need to install anything or create an account?
No. There is no script to embed, no plugin, no account and no card. You paste a URL and about a minute later you have a score out of 10, both screenshots and the findings.
When should I use something other than SiteScore?
Three cases, plainly. If you are a developer tuning Core Web Vitals, use Lighthouse — it goes deeper on performance than we do. If you need to crawl hundreds of pages, track keyword rankings or study backlinks, use a full SEO suite; we follow a handful of internal links and stop. And if you need a legal accessibility conformance statement, you need a human audit: automated checks, ours included, cover part of WCAG and never all of it.
Is the score comparable between sites?
Yes, and that is deliberate. Every angle starts at 10 and loses points per finding, the overall score is the plain mean of the ten, and nothing is weighted or graded on a curve. You can put two sites side by side and the numbers mean the same thing.
See it on your own site
Free score, both screenshots and the top findings — no signup, no card.
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