Site health score
What is a site health score?
A site health score is a single number, usually from 0 to 100, that a site audit tool calculates to summarise how many technical SEO problems it found in a crawl and how serious they are. It turns hundreds of individual checks, such as broken links, missing titles, redirect chains and noindex pages, into one figure you can track over time.
Every tool calculates it differently, so scores are not comparable between tools. Most weight problems by severity, so a broken page or a blocked crawler counts for more than a missing alt attribute, and most score per page and then average across the site. The score is the tool’s view, not Google’s: Google has no site health score, and a high one does not mean a site will rank.
Why site health score matters for SEO
A single number is useful for tracking direction. If the score drops after a release, something broke; if it rises after a clean-up, the fixes worked. It also gives non-specialists a quick read on whether the technical foundation needs attention.
Use it as a starting point, not a goal. A site can score 95 and still have one critical problem, such as an important section set to noindex, that matters more than everything else combined. Always read the issues behind the score, starting with the most severe, and treat it as one part of a wider SEO audit. OpenSEO’s method is set out on the audit checks page.
How to improve a site health score
- Run a full crawl and sort issues by severity.
- Fix critical issues first: server errors, broken pages, broken internal links, redirect loops and pages that block crawlers.
- Then work through warnings, such as missing titles, duplicate content and thin pages, starting with templates that affect many pages at once.
- Re-crawl after each batch of fixes to confirm them and catch new problems.
- Schedule regular audits so regressions show up quickly.
Site health score example
Each page the crawler tried gets a penalty of 25 points per critical issue, 8 per warning and 1 per notice, capped at 100. The score is 100 minus the average penalty across pages, rounded. A site where every page is clean scores 100; one where every page has four critical issues scores 0. Pages blocked by robots.txt are left out, and if no page answered with a success status, the score is 0.
Site health score FAQ
What is a good site health score?
It depends on the tool, but scores in the 90s usually mean few serious problems. What matters more is that no critical issues are left on important pages.
Does Google use a site health score?
No. It is a summary made by audit tools. Google evaluates pages through its own crawling, indexing and ranking systems.
Why do different tools give different health scores?
Each tool runs different checks and weights them differently, so the same site can score very differently. Compare scores within one tool over time, not across tools.
Related SEO terms
An SEO audit is a review of a website’s technical health, content and links to find what holds it back in search and what to fix first.
Technical SEO is making sure search engines can crawl, render and index your site, covering speed, redirects, canonicals, sitemaps and mobile.
Lighthouse is Google’s open-source tool that tests a page in a lab and scores its performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO.
HTTP status codes are three-digit numbers a server returns with each response to say whether a request worked, moved or failed.
A redirect chain is when a URL redirects to another URL that redirects again, so it takes two or more hops to reach the final page.