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Plain-English help

Understand your scan without the tech jargon

This page explains what the dashboard is showing and what the main score cards mean.

What the Overall score means

The Overall tab shows the average of the page scores from the latest scan.

Each page gets its own score first. Then we average those page scores to get the Overall score for the scan.

That means the Overall score reflects the whole scan, not just the homepage.

What the metric cards mean

These are the friendly names we use instead of making you read the browser tooling docs.

Main content appears

How fast the biggest part of the page shows up.

Page becomes usable

How soon buttons, menus, and forms feel ready to click.

First thing appears

When visitors stop seeing a blank screen and see something useful.

Clicks and typing stay responsive

Whether the page feels stuck while scripts are loading.

Page stays steady while loading

Whether content jumps around while the page is still loading.

If you ever want the technical version too, we can add that later without cluttering the main dashboard.

What the Uptime Monitor means

Paid sites are checked every 5 minutes. Here is what each number on that card is telling you.

Uptime (30d)

The share of the last 30 days your site was reachable by visitors. 100% means it never went down. We check every 5 minutes.

Response

How quickly your site answered when we checked it, in milliseconds. Lower is better — under half a second feels instant to visitors.

Last check

When we last confirmed your site was online. Checks run automatically every 5 minutes, around the clock.

Security certificate

The certificate behind the padlock and the “https” in your address — it encrypts visitor data. If it expires, browsers warn people your site is “Not Secure,” and most leave.

Domain registration

Your website’s address, which you rent each year. If it lapses, your site and email both go offline — and someone else can register it.

What the problem list means

These are the issues found in the latest scan, rewritten in plain English so you can act on them without leaving SiteSprout.

Each item in the problems list comes from the actual scan data. Performance, SEO, accessibility, and technical signals feed this view.

We group repeated findings so you can see the biggest patterns first. If a card says urgent, that means the scan found a higher priority issue in that area. If it says fix soon, it is still important, but not the top blocker.

The report keeps the explanation inside SiteSprout. Use this page when you want the plain-English version of what the scan found.

Why we keep the help inside SiteSprout

We keep the explanations in the app so non-technical users do not have to leave SiteSprout to understand what they are looking at.