What is the HubSpot Website Grader, and How Does it Work?

The HubSpot Website Grader is a fast, free way to see where a site is falling short technically. Point it at a URL, and within seconds it emails back a score and a list of specific fixes. It's a genuinely useful starting point, and it's also a narrower tool than its single overall score suggests, especially for a site running in more than one language.

How the Report Works

Running it doesn't require a HubSpot account. Enter the site's URL and an email address, and the Grader scans the page's code and content in the background. The report lands in your inbox within seconds: an overall grade, plus a breakdown across the four categories below, each with the specific issues found and what to do about them. It's built to be re-run, so it's worth treating as a periodic check rather than a one-time score, particularly after a redesign or a plugin change.

What the Website Grader Checks

The Grader scores exactly four categories, and nothing outside them factors into the score:

• Performance: page size, image weight, browser caching, redirect chains, request count, and unoptimized JavaScript or CSS.
• SEO: whether the site is indexable, whether meta descriptions and link text are doing their job, and whether any installed plugin is quietly working against SEO.
• Mobile readiness: font size, layout responsiveness, and whether buttons and links are spaced for a thumb rather than a cursor.
• Security: HTTPS coverage, and whether any third-party JavaScript library is still loading over an insecure connection.

Nothing about brand, copywriting, conversion design or content quality is part of the score. It's a technical health check, not a design review.

What a Clean Grade Doesn't Tell You on a Bilingual Site

Here's the gap that matters most for a site built for this region: none of the four categories check right-to-left correctness, Arabic font loading, or bidirectional text rendering. A clean grade is a real, useful result, but it's a statement about the English half of a bilingual site. It says nothing about whether the Arabic side actually works.

A few ways that shows up in practice:

Layout direction is a theme setting, not a language tag. Right-to-left rendering comes from the dir attribute set in a theme's base template, not from marking a page as Arabic. Selecting Arabic in a multi-language page group changes the language tag and the language switcher, and can leave the layout running left to right anyway if the theme itself was never built for RTL. A page can be correctly tagged Arabic and still be laid out backwards, and the Grader has no category that would catch it.

Mixed-direction text breaks quietly. A phone number, an English product name, or a trailing bracket at the end of an Arabic sentence is bidirectionally neutral text, and it renders in the wrong position unless it's explicitly isolated. It's one of the most common visual defects on Arabic pages, and it's invisible to any automated scan that isn't reading the Arabic itself.

The Arabic font is often the real performance problem. An Arabic webfont typically carries far more glyph coverage than the Latin subset of the same family, which makes an unsubsetted Arabic display face frequently the single largest asset on a page. That shows up in an audit as a generic loading-speed flag rather than as a font-subsetting issue, which is exactly why it survives so many performance reviews unnamed. If your Grader score dings performance and your English pages already look lean, the Arabic font is worth checking before anything else.

None of this is a knock on the tool; it simply wasn't built with a bidirectional site in mind. Our own research across MENA CRM and web buyers puts the number who treat right-to-left formatting as a precondition, not a nice-to-have, at 64%. A Grader score has no way to weigh in on that requirement one way or the other, so a page can pass the scan comfortably while failing the test that most of its actual regional audience applies first.

Use the Grade as a Starting Point

None of this makes the Grader a bad tool. It's free, it's fast, and the fixes it surfaces for performance, SEO, mobile and security are worth acting on regardless of how many languages the site runs. Just don't read a high score as a verdict on the whole site if the site is bilingual: it's one honest read on one half of the experience.

That's a useful order of operations for anyone about to commission a redesign: run the free Grader first, fix what it flags, then bring in someone who can look at the parts it structurally can't see. Skipping straight to the second step wastes a proper review on issues a five-second scan would have caught for free; skipping straight past it and assuming a high Grader score means the bilingual build is done risks shipping a site that scores well and reads backwards for half its audience.

Pairing the automated scan with a proper bidirectional review, checking the theme's dir handling, the font strategy, and how mixed-direction text actually renders, is website design and development work rather than something a URL scanner can do. Meticulosity Global is a HubSpot Diamond Solutions Partner, a status held by fewer than 3% of partners worldwide; reach out if you'd like the Arabic half graded properly too.