ReachKit vs Website Grader

What Website Grader does better

It is broader than ReachKit in the direction that matters most for a slow site. Its own FAQ describes it as an SEO checker that scans your homepage across Site Performance, Search Engine Optimization, Mobile Friendliness and Security — and three of those four are things ReachKit measures not at all. If your problem is a five-second load, a layout that breaks on a phone, or a missing certificate, Website Grader will name it and ReachKit will be silent.

It is also genuinely free, and says so without qualification: HubSpot states you can analyse multiple websites and run repeated assessments after making changes, without subscription fees or usage limits. There is no daily cap to work around, which is more than most free checkers in this bracket offer.

And the report is built for a beginner. Each area comes back as a grade with plain-language recommendations, which is a kinder first experience than a raw list of failed assertions.

Where it leaves a solo founder stranded

It costs an email address. HubSpot's own instructions for using the tool are: enter your website URL in the Website field, add your email address in the Email field, click Get Your Score. The tool is HubSpot's, and the form is a HubSpot form — so the price of the free grade is a marketing contact, which is a perfectly fair trade to offer and one worth knowing about before you type.

It grades your homepage only, and it grades it in isolation. A score out of 100 across four areas tells you how the page compares to best practice; it says nothing about whether anyone is searching for what you sell, whether your rivals are winning those searches, or which of your four grades is the one actually keeping customers away. The recommendations are ordered by area, not by consequence.

The follow-through is a HubSpot follow-through, too — the natural next step the tool offers is HubSpot's own courses and products, which is reasonable but is not a plan for your site.

What ReachKit does instead

ReachKit's free on-page SEO checker at reachkit.app/tools/on-page-check takes a URL and nothing else. No email address, no account, no credit card, and 30 checks per hour rather than a form each time. It reads your live HTML and returns 8 on-page signals — page title, meta description, heading structure, content depth, structured data, canonical URL, social share tags, and images & alt text — with the specific fix spelled out for every one that fails.

The trade is real and worth stating plainly: those 8 signals are on-page only. ReachKit does not measure page speed, mobile usability or security, so it cannot replace Website Grader on three of its four areas.

What ReachKit adds instead is the half no grader has: your search footprint. The 8 signals are combined by geometric mean with how many real queries you already rank for into a 0–100 Discoverability Score — so the number moves on whether people can find you, not on how many best practices you satisfied. It is deterministic, and no language model touches it.

The paid plan turns that into a ranked weekly action plan — one task surfaced per day, each item citing the evidence behind it — and the next weekly scan re-measures the site so a score gain is attributed to the on-page fix you shipped rather than assumed. €29.50/month, the 50% launch price, locked for life, normally €59.

Who should pick which

Pick Website Grader if you want a fast, free, four-area read on your homepage — especially if you have never checked page speed, mobile or security, and you do not mind handing over an email address for it.

Pick ReachKit if you would rather not give an email address to run a check, if you want to re-run it thirty times while you edit, or if what you need is not another grade but an ordered list of what to do first and a re-measurement next week that says whether it worked.