What Is a Website Health Score?

Why one number beats five dashboards

Uptime monitoring, performance checks, error tracking, journey tests, and visual diffs each answer a narrow question on their own. Reviewing several separate views to answer "is the site healthy today" does not scale once you are watching more than a couple of pages.

Without a composite score, teams tend to notice degradation only after one specific check turns red — by which point response times may have already been drifting upward, or a journey may have already been failing intermittently for days.

How NorthDuty calculates the score

Every NorthDuty project has a single health score from 0 to 100. It recalculates automatically each time a health check, user journey run, or visual diff completes, so it always reflects the most recent evidence rather than a stale snapshot.

The score is a weighted composite of three domains: website health at 50%, user journeys at 30%, and visual/UI changes at 20%. Within the website health domain, the sub-score itself blends uptime, response-time performance, error rate, and stability, each weighted differently based on how directly it affects whether a visitor can use the page.

If a project has no data yet for one domain — for example, no journeys have been configured — that domain is excluded from the calculation and the remaining weights redistribute proportionally. The score never penalizes you for monitoring you have not set up yet, but it also will not tell you the full story until you do.

Conclusion

A health score is only useful if it is built from real, continuously collected evidence rather than a single check run once a day.

NorthDuty recalculates its 0-100 score from uptime, performance, errors, journeys, and visual changes every time new data comes in, giving teams one trustworthy number to watch alongside the detailed results behind it.