Optimize Your Website with the Website Success Score

What is the Website Success Score?

You can find the Website Success Score under "Issue Overview" in your Ryte project, along with many other important website KPIs. The Website Success Score is a value between 0 and 100 that shows the optimization status of your website – i.e. how good your website is. It is calculated using a complex algorithm which takes into account many different OnPage factors.

Figure 1: The Website Success Score in the Issue Overview

When calculating the Website Success Score for the project, the score 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 Website Success Score. It’s possible that a URL with one serious error might have a lower score than a URL with lots of smaller errors. The Website Success Score displayed on the dashboard shows the weighted, average score of all URLs of the website. The Website Success Score 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 Website Success Score 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 Website Success Score

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

Figure 4: Keep track of improvements in your Website Success Score with score history

If you check your Website Success Score 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 Website Success Score is not just to obtain a high score – the Website Success Score simply indicates the overall optimization status of your website. Your goal is to optimize your website, and the Website Success Score can help you measure its success.