What the score actually measures
The Cawley Score runs Google’s own PageSpeed Insights API against your URL, using the Lighthouse mobile profile, and reports four of its categories. The audit runs live in your browser every time — there is no cached score and no number typed in by us.
- Mobile speed35%
- How fast the page actually loads and becomes usable on a mid-range phone on mobile data — not on your office broadband. It carries the most weight because most local searches happen on a phone, and a visitor who waits never sees anything else you did well.Lighthouse category: Performance
- SEO30%
- Whether a search engine can read the page cleanly: titles and descriptions, crawlable links, readable text, a valid canonical. This is the floor, not the ceiling — it says Google can understand you, not that you will outrank anyone.Lighthouse category: SEO
- Trust & security20%
- HTTPS, no browser console errors, no deprecated APIs, images at the right resolution. Individually small; together they are the difference between a site that feels maintained and one that feels abandoned.Lighthouse category: Best Practices
- Accessibility15%
- Colour contrast, labelled form fields, alt text, keyboard operability. It is a legal consideration under the Equality Act 2010, and it is also just lost enquiries: a form nobody can complete is a form nobody completes.Lighthouse category: Accessibility
How the grades work
The overall figure is the weighted average of the four pillars above, then banded:
| Grade | Score | What it means |
|---|
| A | 90–100 | Genuinely good. Keep it that way. |
| B | 75–89 | Solid, with room to win more. |
| C | 55–74 | Leaving real money on the table. |
| D | 35–54 | Actively costing you customers. |
| F | 0–34 | Something is badly wrong. |
Questions about the score
- Is the Cawley Score really free?
- Yes. No signup, no email address, no card. You paste a URL and get the result. We do not gate the number behind a form, because a score you have to trade your details for is a lead magnet, not an audit.
- How is the score calculated?
- We run Google's PageSpeed Insights API — the same Lighthouse engine Google publishes — against your URL using its mobile profile, and take four category scores back. The overall figure is a weighted average: mobile speed 35%, SEO 30%, trust & security 20%, accessibility 15%. Nothing is adjusted by hand.
- Do you store my website address?
- The audit runs in your own browser and calls Google directly; the result never touches our servers. We do record that a scan happened, and the URL scanned, in our analytics — so we can see the tool is being used. We do not build a contact record from it and nobody will call you because you ran a score.
- Why is my score different from another tool's?
- Lighthouse measures a real page load, so results move between runs depending on your host, your traffic and the network at that moment. Treat a single score as a reading, not a verdict — the useful signal is which pillar is lowest, and whether it moves after you fix something.
- What does the score not measure?
- Whether your site actually persuades anyone. It cannot see your copy, your photographs, your reviews, whether the phone number is above the fold, or whether the enquiry form reaches you. A site can score an A and still take no calls. This is the technical floor, not the whole job.
Scored badly and want it fixed? Tell us your trade and town and we’ll build a faster, higher-scoring version of your site and send you the live link before you pay anything. Or see sites we’ve already built.