If you've ever searched "check my website performance," you've probably run into a dozen different tools, each giving you a slightly different score and a slightly different list of problems. It's easy to come away more confused than when you started.
The tools aren't wrong — they're just measuring different things for different audiences. Understanding what each one actually does helps you pick the right one for your situation and interpret the results correctly.
Google PageSpeed Insights
pagespeed.web.dev — Free
PageSpeed Insights is Google's own tool, and for local businesses it's the most important one to pay attention to. It measures how fast your website loads using real-world data from Chrome users, and scores your site from 0 to 100 separately for mobile and desktop.
The Core Web Vitals it measures — LCP, FID/TBT, and CLS — are the same signals Google uses as ranking factors. If you're going to use one tool to understand how Google sees your website, this is it.
✓ Good for
- — Understanding how Google measures your site
- — Identifying specific slow elements
- — Checking mobile vs. desktop differences
- — Free with no account required
✕ Misses
- — No SEO content analysis
- — No broken link detection
- — No competitor comparison
- — Technical output, hard to interpret without experience
GTmetrix
gtmetrix.com — Free tier available
GTmetrix provides a similar performance analysis to PageSpeed Insights but with a more visual interface and some additional features. It shows you a waterfall chart of every resource your page loads, which is useful for identifying specific slow elements.
The free tier tests from a single location (usually Vancouver). If your audience is primarily in the UK or Australia, the results may not reflect their actual experience. The paid tier allows location-specific testing, which matters for local businesses.
✓ Good for
- — Visual waterfall breakdown
- — Historical tracking over time
- — More readable than raw PageSpeed output
✕ Misses
- — Free tier tests from one location only
- — No SEO or content analysis
- — Still technical, not business-focused
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
screamingfrog.co.uk — Free up to 500 URLs
Screaming Frog is a desktop application that crawls your entire website and produces a detailed technical SEO report. It's the tool of choice for professional SEO auditors — comprehensive, accurate, and genuinely useful for finding issues like broken links, duplicate content, missing meta tags, and redirect chains.
For a small business owner without SEO experience, it's overwhelming. The output is a spreadsheet with hundreds of columns. Knowing which columns matter and what the numbers mean requires significant background knowledge.
✓ Good for
- — Full site technical SEO crawl
- — Broken link and redirect detection
- — Duplicate content identification
- — Meta tag analysis across all pages
✕ Misses
- — No performance or speed data
- — Requires SEO knowledge to interpret
- — Desktop app, not browser-based
- — Not designed for non-technical users
AI-Powered Audit Tools (including ours)
zolisabo.com/free-audit — Free
A newer category of audit tool combines technical performance data (from PageSpeed Insights) with AI analysis to produce a plain-English summary that a non-technical business owner can actually act on.
The tool I built at zolisabo.com/free-audit works this way. It runs your site through Google's PageSpeed API to get the raw performance data, then passes the results to Claude (Anthropic's AI) which interprets the numbers, identifies the most impactful issues, and writes a clear explanation with specific recommendations.
The output is designed for the business owner, not the developer: what's wrong, why it matters for your business, and what to do about it in order of priority.
✓ Good for
- — Business owners without technical background
- — Plain English explanation of issues
- — Prioritised action list
- — Fast — results in under 60 seconds
- — No account or sign-up required
✕ Misses
- — Surface-level scan only (one page)
- — No full site crawl
- — No Google Ads or Analytics review
- — No conversion path analysis
At a Glance
| PageSpeed | GTmetrix | Scr. Frog | AI Audit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Performance score | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| SEO basics | ✓ | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Full site crawl | — | — | ✓ | — |
| Plain English output | — | — | — | ✓ |
| No sign-up needed | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Best for | Developers | Developers | SEO pros | Business owners |
What none of them cover
Every tool above looks at your website in isolation. None of them look at your Google Ads account, your Google Maps presence, your analytics setup, or how all of these connect into a customer journey.
That's what a full audit does. It's not just "is the website fast?" — it's "is the entire system working together to turn visitors into clients?" A technically perfect website with broken conversion tracking and a misconfigured Google Ads account is still losing you money every day.
Start with the free scan
If you want a quick sense of where your website stands technically, the free AI audit is the fastest place to start. No sign-up, results in under a minute, plain English output.
When you're ready to go deeper — Google Ads, analytics, conversion path, the full picture — that's what the full audit covers.
Zoli Sabo
Digital marketing auditor working with local service businesses across the EU, UK, and Australia.