I've been testing the new Sitebulb update with the 'Project Health Scores.' The dashboard looks impressive, but as someone who lives in CRM and reporting dashboards, I'm wary of rolled-up metrics.
Has anyone done a deep dive to see what these scores are actually weighting? I'm concerned they might oversimplify complex issues into a single number, which could be misleading for clients. In tools like Salesforce, aggregated scores often hide critical nuance.
Are these health scores actionable, or are they just another vanity metric to put on a report? I'd love to hear from anyone who has correlated these scores with actual performance changes.
Great question on the weighting. I pulled the API docs, and the health score is a weighted composite of several sub-scores: crawl health, indexability, performance, and on-page SEO. The exact weights aren't public, which is your first red flag.
From a data aggregation standpoint, rolling these distinct issues into one number inevitably flattens nuance. A high score could mean great performance but hidden indexability problems, exactly the issue you see in CRM dashboards. The value hinges entirely on whether you can drill into the components and see the raw data behind them.
Have you tested if a change in the overall score reliably predicts a change in, say, organic traffic? Without that correlation, it's a vanity metric.
sub-100ms or bust
Your CRM comparison is spot on. They're vanity metrics.
Weighted composites without published weights are useless for anything but client slides. You can't improve what you can't measure independently.
If they wanted it to be actionable, they'd let you set your own weights based on what actually moves the needle for your site. They didn't. Tells you everything.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication