Optimize Your Website with the OnPage Score

What is the OPS?

You can find the OPS on the dashboard of your Ryte project, along with many other important website KPIs.

The OPS is a value between 0 and 100 that shows the optimization status of your website – i.e. how good your website is. The OPS is calculated using a complex algorithm which takes into account many different OnPage factors.

Figure 1: The OnPage Score on the Project Dashboard

When calculating the OPS for the project, the OPS for each individual URL is firstly determined. Factors such as status code, number of inbound links, loading time, click depth from the homepage, canonical tag usage, and many other factors are taken into consideration.

Then, all factors are weighed and summarized in the URL-specific OPS. It’s possible that a URL with one serious error might have a lower OPS than a URL with lots of smaller errors.

The OPS displayed on the dashboard shows the weighted, average OPS of all URLs of the website. The OPS therefore gives an indication of the level of optimization of the whole project. A few critical errors can drag down the score of the whole website.

How Can I Use the OPS to Optimize My Website?

You can derive optimization measures from the report "OPS distribution", which you can find in Website Success under the menu point "Links". This shows how the OPS is distributed across the different URLs of the website, meaning that you can easily see whether your website’s optimization is generally poor, or if a few URLs are dragging the overall score down.

Figure 2: The OPS distribution report in Website Success

When optimizing your URLs, start with those with a low OPS, especially if your website has a high number of these. The lower the OPS of a webpage, the bigger the problem is likely to be. For example, a URL with a 404 status code would have an OPS of 5, and a URL with a status code 500 will have an OPS of 0. These serious errors can also be found in the report "critical errors" which should be checked regularly.

Tips for troubleshooting:

• When you find critical errors such as status codes 500, you may need to adjust your .htaccess file.
• Remove links to 404 pages, or make sure that content can be found on all linked URLs.
• Use the single page analysis to analyze web pages with a low OPS to find the optimization potential of these specific URLs.

Figure 3: Identifying optimization potential with the single page analysis

Monitor Your Website’s Optimization with the OPS

The data from the latest crawl is always used for calculating the OPS. If you crawl your website regularly, and continuously implement optimization measures, the OPS can show you how your optimization measures are impacting your website over time. The OPS history in particular will help you monitor changes or improvements in your website – you can find the OPS history by clicking on the OPS in the dashboard.

Figure 4: Keep track of improvements in your OnPage Score with OPS history

If you check your OPS history regularly, you will see if your website optimization is heading in the right direction – ideally, you will see it improving over time. If you find that your website is not improving, you will be able to react accordingly – the reports available with Ryte will help you gain a deeper technical insight into problems.

Conclusion

The goal of optimizing using the OPS is not just to obtain a high OPS – the OPS simply indicates the overall optimization status of your website. Your goal is to optimize your website, and the OPS can help you measure its success.