Somebody lands on your website who has never heard of you. In about four seconds they form a feeling about whether you are worth taking seriously. They spend the next few minutes looking for reasons to justify the feeling they already have, and then they either raise their hand or they leave without telling you anything at all.
That is what we measure. Not design, not traffic, not conversion rate. A site can rank first, look expensive, and still leave a stranger with nothing to believe. That is the most common condition we find and it is the one that costs the most, because it does all of its damage in silence. Nobody fills in a form to tell you they did not buy it.
If we told you your website feels evasive, you would be entitled to ignore us. It is an opinion, you have heard opinions before, and the last three people who had one were selling something.
So we built an instrument instead. It reads your site the way a first-time buyer would, scores what it finds, and cites the page behind every deduction. The number is not the point. The number is what makes the paragraph arguable. You can disagree with a feeling forever. You cannot disagree with there being no price on any of your fourteen pages for very long.
Before any score, you get the read. Three paragraphs describing what it is actually like to arrive on your site as a stranger. No score in it, no scoring language, no jargon. Clients quote the read back to us months later. Almost nobody quotes the number.
A number nobody understands does not change what anyone does on Monday. A paragraph somebody recognises does.
Roughly in this order, usually without noticing they are doing it.
Does a stranger feel that somebody is actually here, that this is about them rather than about you, and can they picture what happens next? Story is where the feeling gets made or lost. Everything that follows is the buyer checking whether the feeling was warranted.
Does your site say the things a buyer expects you to avoid saying? What it costs. Who you are wrong for. What happens when it does not work. Every one of those answered on the page removes a reason to go and ask somebody else first. This pillar carries the most weight, because it is the one you control completely and most companies decline to use it.
Can a stranger confirm any of this without taking your word for it? Named clients, outcomes anyone can check, anything at all that lives somewhere you do not own. Standing is what stops the whole thing collapsing the moment the buyer leaves your site and goes looking for somebody else saying the same thing about you.
There is a fourth thing we check that is not persuasion at all: whether the lights are on. Stale copyright, dead links in your menu, template text nobody ever replaced. It carries almost no weight and it can override everything else, which is worth its own section further down.
The story pillar is where most sites lose the room, so we take it apart into nine questions and answer each one from what is actually on your site.
Do you know who is reading, in their language and in their situation, or do you have a job title?
What do they ask you for, and what are they actually buying? Those are almost never the same thing, and the gap between them is where most business-to-business messaging misfires.
There is the problem they would put in an email and there is the private one underneath it, which is usually about exposure. Sites that only address the first one read as competent and land as cold.
Are you beside the buyer or in front of them? You have to show you understand what this is like, and you have to show you can actually do the work. Most sites manage one.
Can a visitor repeat your process to a colleague after they close the tab? If they cannot, they cannot defend buying you in a room you are not in.
Your largest competitor is usually the buyer doing nothing for another quarter, and almost nobody says out loud what that costs.
Not the metric that improves. The person they get to be if this works. This is the sentence customers repeat to each other, and most companies have never written it down.
Where does your site argue with something the reader already believes, without acknowledging that they believe it? That is where a true sentence gets disbelieved, and being clearer does not fix it. Only acknowledgement does.
What do you take for granted that a first-time visitor does not know? Usually a term, a number, or a category label that is obvious inside your building and meaningless outside it.
Six and seven are missing from nearly every site we score. They are also the two a buyer repeats to somebody else.
Whether the lights are on carries the smallest weight of anything we measure, and it is the only thing that can override the rest of your score entirely. A visitor who finds template text still sitting in production, or a copyright line three years old, or a dead link in your main menu, stops reading. Everything you did well is behind a door they have just decided not to open.
So any one of these caps your total at 49, no matter what the rest of the site earns:
When it happens we show you both numbers. What you scored, and what you would have scored without it. We have watched that gap cross an entire band. One page nobody had opened in a year was the difference between a site that reads as credible and one that reads as unproven.
A five-letter scale forces a choice between calling a 50 a passing grade, which is not honest, and calling everything below 40 a failure, which stops telling you anything useful. Most business-to-business sites at this size land between 25 and 50 the first time they are scored. Bands that describe a condition are more use to you than a letter that only describes disappointment.
Two of those bands are the whole game. Getting from claims only to credible with gaps is most of the work and most of the return.
Which is not the same as how bad each one looks. Some repairs are wasted while an earlier failure is still open.
If your site looks inactive, or a visitor cannot find a way to talk to you, nothing further down the list gets read. This comes first.
Price, risk, and the names of the people who do the work. The cheapest points available, decisions rather than production. Most companies close most of this gap in a week, if the owner is willing to say what things cost and put their name on the promise.
Takes the longest, because proof has to be gathered, filmed, permissioned and published. Start it alongside the second stage rather than after it.
Does not really end. The work that keeps the score from sliding back.
Fair question, and refusing to answer it would cost us points on our own scale. Everything on this page is published because it helps you. The weighting, the thresholds inside each band, and the rules we apply when a case is ambiguous are not, because that is the part that took years of scored sites to get right. Publishing it would let anybody produce a number shaped like ours without any of the discipline behind it.
If you want the reasoning behind your own number, ask us. We will walk you through every deduction and show you the page it came from.
We also do not cite anybody else's book. Every signal here is here because we watched it decide a deal, or watched its absence kill one. Ask why we measure something and you will get a case we can describe, not a chapter we can quote.
Beautiful and believable are unrelated conditions, and we score only the second one.
That is a different problem with a different fix. Plenty of sites we score are found easily and believed by nobody.
The scan names where trust leaks and in what order it has to be closed. It does not prescribe. That is the work we get paid for, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.
Put in a URL. No email, no signup, no call.
Score your site freeRead against the Trust Readiness Standard, version 2.0.