How to Read a Website Intelligence Report: A Practical Guide

A website intelligence report contains more information than most people know what to do with. Scan scores, dimension breakdowns, technology detections, benchmark comparisons, and prioritised recommendations — it can feel overwhelming if you do not know what to look at first and what each number actually means.

This guide walks through every section of a SiteReveal report in the order you should read it, explains what the data is telling you, and shows you how to translate it into a concrete action plan.

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Start With the Overall WIS Score

The Website Intelligence Score™ (WIS) is a single number from 0 to 100 that summarises your site's overall technical health across six dimensions. It is the first thing to look at because it gives you an immediate sense of where you stand.

The score band matters as much as the number itself. A score of 74 (top of Modern) and a score of 75 (bottom of Advanced) are nearly identical in practice — what matters is which band you are in and which specific signals are dragging you down.

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Read the Dimension Breakdown

Below the overall score, the report shows six dimension scores. These are the most actionable part of the report because they tell you where the problems are.

The Six Dimensions

Security (25% of WIS) covers HTTPS, security headers, and cookie configuration. This is the highest-weighted dimension because security failures have the most severe consequences — breached users, regulatory fines, and search engine penalties.

Performance (20% of WIS) measures CDN usage, asset compression, caching headers, and HTTP/2 support. Performance directly affects user experience and conversion rates; Google's Core Web Vitals are a subset of what this dimension measures.

SEO (20% of WIS) evaluates title tags, meta descriptions, Open Graph tags, structured data, sitemap presence, and robots.txt configuration. A strong SEO score means search engines can correctly index and display your content.

Tech Modernity (20% of WIS) assesses the age and currency of your technology stack — framework versions, deprecated APIs, end-of-life libraries. Outdated technology is a security risk and a performance bottleneck.

Accessibility (10% of WIS) checks ARIA landmarks, alt text, language attributes, and semantic HTML. Accessibility failures are increasingly a legal liability in addition to a UX problem.

Data & Analytics (5% of WIS) detects analytics platforms, cookie consent mechanisms, and tag management. This dimension is smaller in weight but signals operational maturity.

How to Prioritise

When reading the dimension breakdown, look for the combination of low score and high weight. A Security score of 40 is more urgent than an Accessibility score of 40, because Security contributes 25% to your WIS versus 10% for Accessibility.

A useful mental model: multiply the dimension score gap (100 minus your score) by the dimension weight to get a rough "opportunity score". The dimension with the highest opportunity score is where to focus first.

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Examine the Technology Stack

The technology detection section lists every technology SiteReveal identified on your site, along with a confidence score for each detection. This section is valuable for three reasons.

Inventory awareness. Many organisations do not have a complete picture of what is running on their website — especially if the site has been maintained by multiple teams or agencies over the years. The tech stack section often surfaces forgotten scripts, outdated analytics tags, or third-party tools that were added and never removed.

Security risk identification. Outdated versions of frameworks and libraries are a common attack vector. If the report shows jQuery 1.x, Bootstrap 3, or PHP 7.x, these are end-of-life versions with known vulnerabilities.

Competitive intelligence. When you run a report on a competitor's site, the technology stack tells you what tools they are using — their CMS, analytics platform, A/B testing tool, CDN, and more.

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Review the Signal Evidence Table

Each dimension in the report includes a signal evidence table — a list of specific checks that were performed, whether each one passed or failed, and the confidence level of the detection.

This is the most granular part of the report and the most useful for developers. Instead of knowing that your Security score is 62, you can see exactly which signals are missing: perhaps HSTS is absent, CSP is present but weak, and cookie flags are correctly set.

How to use it: Sort the table by impact (highest deduction first) and work through the failures in order. Each failed signal includes a brief explanation of what it means and why it matters.

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Understand the Industry Benchmark

The benchmark section compares your WIS and dimension scores against the median and top-10% scores for your industry. This context is important because "good" is relative.

A WIS of 65 might be above the median for small business websites (median: 44) but well below the median for SaaS companies (median: 74). The benchmark tells you whether you are ahead of or behind your competitive peer group.

If your score is above the industry median but below the top 10%, the benchmark section shows you what the best-performing sites in your category are doing differently — which is a useful framing for prioritising improvements.

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Read the AI-Generated Recommendations

The recommendations section is generated by analysing your specific score breakdown and technology stack. Unlike generic "improve your security" advice, these recommendations are specific to your site's actual configuration.

Each recommendation includes:

• What to fix — the specific signal or configuration that needs to change
• Why it matters — the business or technical impact of the current state
• How to fix it — concrete implementation steps appropriate for your technology stack
• Expected score impact — an estimate of how many WIS points the fix will add

Read the recommendations in priority order (they are sorted by score impact by default) and use them as a task list for your development team.

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Use the Report as a Baseline

A single report is a snapshot. The real value of website intelligence comes from tracking changes over time — running a scan after each significant deployment, comparing scores before and after a migration, and monitoring for regressions.

SiteReveal's History page shows your score trend over time and highlights when significant changes occurred. Use this to:

• Verify improvements — confirm that a security header implementation actually registered
• Catch regressions — detect when a deployment accidentally removed a header or broke a configuration
• Report progress — show stakeholders a before/after comparison when making the business case for technical investment

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Sharing and Acting on the Report

SiteReveal reports are designed to be shared. Each report has a unique public URL that you can send to clients, stakeholders, or your development team without requiring them to log in.

For client-facing use, the report's executive summary section — the overall score, band, and top three recommendations — is designed to be readable by non-technical stakeholders. The detailed signal tables are for the technical team.

Practical workflow:

1. Run the scan and review the overall score and band
2. Identify the two or three highest-impact dimension failures
3. Share the report URL with your development team with specific sections highlighted
4. Implement the top recommendations
5. Re-scan to verify the improvements registered
6. Compare the before/after scores for stakeholder reporting

Run a free scan now to generate your first website intelligence report.