ARTICLE
What Your Website Audit Score Actually Means
Understand the five audit categories, how scores convert to grades, and what each grade means for your website's health and search visibility.
Mar 26, 20264 min read
The grade on your audit report isn't arbitrary
When you run a website audit through Recon, you get a letter grade — A through F — alongside a numerical score from 0 to 100. That grade isn't a vague quality rating. It's a weighted composite of five distinct categories, each measuring a different dimension of your site's health.
Understanding what goes into that score is the difference between treating the audit as a curiosity and using it as a roadmap.
The five categories and their weights
Every audit evaluates your site across five categories. The weights reflect how much each category contributes to the overall score:
- SEO (30%) — Title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, alt text, canonical URLs, structured data, sitemap, and robots.txt
- Performance (25%) — Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Contentful Paint (FCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), Total Blocking Time (TBT), and Speed Index
- Security (20%) — SSL certificate validity, HTTP security headers (HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options), cookie flags, and mixed content
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