How to read your inspection report without a web person

The free inspection hands you a grade, a count, and a list. If you have never seen one before, it can look like a lot. This article walks through each part using one made-up example, so you know what you are looking at before you run it on yours.

Numbers about other websites on this page come from our census records as of October 16, 2026.

The example

Say the inspection returns this for a plumbing company in Fort Myers:

A number that used to be here

Until 2026-09-22 the report led with a second figure: how many of every hundred visitors had a reason to leave. We retired it. It rested on four borrowed research rates, and none of them held up when we read the original studies. The full account is here. The report now leads with the grade and the findings, which are measured on your page.

The grade

The grade is a letter that sums up the score. The grade bands are:

• A: 92 and above. The site passes almost everything.
• B: 82 to 91. A few small things to fix.
• C: 70 to 81. Passing the basics; some real gaps.
• D: 55 to 69. Several gaps worth fixing.
• F: below 55. Serious problems throughout.

The example grades a D at 61. Of the 78,807 sites in our count, 5,533 grade a D. The middle score is 83.

A D is not a disaster. It is honest. It means the site has real problems, and fixing the top two or three will move the number. The inspection lists them in the order that matters, not alphabetically.

The finding count

Below the grade you see something like this: 14 passed, 2 partial, 7 failed, of 23 checks run.

Not every check runs on every site. The engine, the program that reads your site and grades it, fits them to the business. A restaurant is not asked about online booking; a salon is. A Florida site gets a check its out-of-state counterpart does not.

The count that matters is the number of failed checks. Some checks count more than others, by our own judgment. A failed check of the heaviest kind costs three times as much as one of the lightest.

The summary

Right under the grade is a short summary. It has one of four headlines, from "This site measured well" to "Several serious findings". The two heaviest also say how many findings there are and how many of them are serious.

The summary names none of the findings. The list below it names each one and what to change. A summary that says nothing serious was found is a good result, even if a few small findings are listed. "Several serious findings" means three or more of the heaviest checks failed on the page we read.

The finding list

Below the summary is every finding, one at a time, starting with the heaviest.

Each finding has four parts:

1. The label, like "Tappable phone number."
2. What it means, in plain English.
3. What the engine looked at, so you or your web person can find the same thing.
4. The fix, and the ask: what a passing site has instead, roughly how long a web person needs, and the question to hand them.

The engine writes that note for every check it fails. It is the same note whoever looks after your site would read, so you can hand it over as it is.

The checks the engine skips

Near the bottom is a list of checks the engine could not measure on your site, and why. It only appears when there are some. This is not a list of problems, and those checks count neither for you nor against you.

The last lines of most reports also say what no machine check can see, such as whether text is too light to read or how the page looks on a real phone. Those need eyes, and the report says so rather than guessing.

What to do with it

Read the top three failures. Those are the ones with the most weight. If you or the person who built the site can fix one this week, fix the heaviest one first.