The Professor's Web Design Report Card

It's a free online tool that grades websites across 40+ individual SEO and technical checks and returns the actual data behind each result - not just a pass/fail tick. It's built for web designers checking their own work before handover, clients verifying that a new site has been optimised properly, and DIY SEO-ers who want to understand exactly what Google sees when it crawls their pages.

Yes - completely free, no account needed, no email required, no usage limits. Enter any URL and get your full report instantly. It's part of the 90+ free SEO tools available in The Professor's SEO Toolbox, all running without sign-up or subscription.

The report covers eight categories of checks: PWA & AI discoverability (manifest, service worker, llms.txt, IndexNow), content & on-page SEO (title tag, meta description, H1 structure, word count, image alt text), UX & navigation (internal links, CTA placement, external links), URL redirects & canonicalisation (HTTP?HTTPS, www consistency, redirect chains, HSTS), technical SEO (viewport, robots.txt, sitemap, structured data, favicon), social & rich results (Open Graph, JSON-LD schema), Google Ecosystem (Search Console verification, Analytics, Google Business Profile signals), security headers (7 headers including CSP, HSTS, X-Frame-Options), server config (load time, SSL validity, domain age), and now Domain Authority via the Site Authority Score.

Each check is weighted by its SEO impact - a missing title tag costs more points than a missing hreflang tag. The total earned points are divided by the maximum possible to give a percentage, which maps to a letter grade: A (90-100%), B (80-89%), C (70-79%), D (60-69%), F (below 60%). The grading is entirely technical - it does not factor in visual design, which means a beautiful site can still score an F if the SEO foundations aren't in place.

Yes, and that's exactly what it's designed for. Each check returns the actual data found (or not found), so you know precisely what to fix. Most checks include a direct link to the relevant free tool that helps fix the issue - the schema generator, the .htaccess builder, the image optimiser, and so on. Fix the issues, re-run the report, and watch your score improve. If you'd prefer someone else to do the fixing, the modular SEO services let you hire The Professor for just the specific thing that needs attention.

The word count check counts only the readable body content - stripping navigation, scripts, headers, and footers - and flags if a page is thin (under 300 words), borderline (300-600), or well-stocked (600+). Thin content is one of the most common reasons pages fail to rank even when their technical setup is solid. Google wants pages that genuinely answer a user's question, and word count is a rough proxy for content depth. Service pages, landing pages, and blog posts all have different targets, but 600+ is a safe general benchmark for pages you want to rank.

The SAS is a 0-100 domain authority metric that combines Open PageRank, global site rank, and scoring consistency into a single number - similar in concept to Moz DA or Ahrefs DR, but using free open-source data from Common Crawl with no account required. It gives you a realistic sense of how much link authority your domain carries, which directly affects how easily your pages can rank. The Report Card pulls this automatically and shows your OPR score, authority tier, and PR strength alongside the rest of your results. For deeper analysis and side-by-side competitor comparison, use the full Site Authority Score checker.

IndexNow is an open protocol supported by Bing, Yandex, and other search engines (and increasingly used as a Google signal) that lets you notify search engines the moment a page is published or updated - rather than waiting for the next scheduled crawl. For sites that publish new content regularly, implementing IndexNow means faster indexing and fresher results in search. The Report Card checks for IndexNow implementation automatically. If you're not using it, The Professor's free IndexNow URL Submitter lets you submit pages manually with no setup required.

No. The tool reads only publicly accessible information from your URL - the same HTML a browser or search engine crawler would receive. It doesn't write anything to your site, doesn't interact with any admin systems, and has no effect on rankings or user sessions. It is read-only by design.

The grading system uses over 40 independent checks based on current SEO best practices, Google's own published guidelines, and 30 years of applied SEO experience. It is not a Google tool and the score is not a direct measure of search ranking. What it does give you is a clear, prioritised picture of where your site's technical and content foundations are strong versus where there's work to do - which is exactly what any SEO audit is designed to provide. The Report Card engine is updated regularly as best practices evolve.