After reviewing numerous auditing dashboards I have created an observation that different tools calculate their "website health score" for a given site using individual, arbitrary rules. For instance, one tool gives me a rating of 90%, while another shows multiple structural issues resulting in a failing score. Obviously, one has to ask how much of this value actually represents a real-world impact to organic visibility, versus how attractive it may look on a customer report card.

Through my review process I have also found that the discipline of obsessing about achieving a perfect metric from a software dashboard can detract from the elements that really do move the needle. Rather than attempting to create a high website health score, we should focus on user interaction points, mobile architecture and how search engines crawl our pages.

Having a high website health score may be impressive when shown to stakeholders, but if there are no conversions and the purpose of your content is not in alignment with user intent, then that number means nothing at all. It would be great to receive input from others on their experience of working with a generated grade via a piece of software-generated data management system. Is the number generated so absurd that you would spend countless hours trying to obtain a perfect overall score? Or is this figure merely a tool from which to build an improved experience of users? Lets talk about it.