Four tools, none of which asks for your email

Every free website tool in this market is a lead-capture form wearing a calculator costume. You answer eight questions, it tells you your score is 43, and the fix is behind an email address. These four are not that. They run in your browser, nothing is sent anywhere, and two of them will tell you that you do not need to hire anybody.
  • Four tools, all free
  • No email, no signup
  • Nothing leaves your browser
  • Two may talk you out of hiring me

The four

Twelve questions weighted by how much each one actually moves enquiries, not by how easy it is to fix. Google Business Profile and reviews outweigh unique title tags, because they should. No email, and the 85-plus band tells you that you may not need me.
The publish gate from Townsmith, running in your browser. Build up a service-area page and watch it get refused. Below the threshold it will not publish, and arguing with it does not help. It will not let you publish a bad page. That is the entire feature.
Two load times running side by side on the real clock. Everyone has read that a site should load in under three seconds. Almost nobody has sat and watched what six and a bit feels like. No case study attached. It demonstrates a duration and says so.
Arithmetic on the published price list, so it cannot quietly disagree with what I charge. Change the job and the number moves in front of you. No email gate, and it says plainly that it is an estimate, not a quote.

Why there is no email gate on any of them

Because the gate is what makes the tool worthless. The moment a score sits behind an email address, the score stops being a measurement and becomes bait, and everyone involved knows it. The number gets tuned to be alarming rather than accurate, because an alarming number generates more addresses. I have used enough of these to recognise the pattern: whatever you enter, you are somewhere in the forties.

The site scorer here tops out honestly. If you answer the twelve questions well it tells you that you score above 85 and probably do not need me, which is a strange thing to build if the goal were harvesting addresses. It is there because a tool that cannot return good news cannot be trusted when it returns bad news.

These are still marketing, and pretending otherwise would be worse

Obviously I would like you to hire me. These pages exist partly because a useful tool is a better introduction than a brochure, and partly because tools get linked to and service pages do not, which matters to a domain nobody has linked to yet. That is the whole strategy and there is no point being coy about it.

The deal is just that you get something usable whether or not you ever email me. Run the estimator, take the number, ring three other developers with it. That is a perfectly good outcome and it is the reason the estimator does arithmetic on the published price list rather than on a formula I keep to myself.

Where each one came from

None of these was designed as a marketing asset. Each one is a demonstration of an argument I got tired of having in meetings. The publish gate exists because I kept being asked for thirty location pages and needed a way to show, rather than explain, why that is a bad idea. It is a working miniature of Townsmith, the WordPress plugin I built and sell, which does the same thing to real pages.

The speed comparison exists because “your site takes six seconds” means nothing to anybody, and watching six seconds pass means quite a lot. The estimator exists because the honest answer to “what does a website cost” is a number, and every competitor answers it with a contact form. The scorer exists because I wanted to know whether my own weighting held up when somebody else applied it.

What to read next

If the scorer flagged your speed, the Core Web Vitals audit is the paid version of that answer. If it flagged AI visibility, that is the SEO and AI search page. If the estimator produced a number you want to sanity-check against the market rather than against me, I have written up what a website actually costs in the UK, and every fact about how I work is on facts.

Used the tools. Want the real answer?

Get a quote in four questions
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This page, measured in your browser

Your device
LCPMeasuring…
How long until the main content appears. Google wants under 2.5 seconds.
INPMeasuring…
How quickly the page answers when you tap. Under 200ms is the target.
CLSMeasuring…
How much the layout moves while loading. Under 0.1, ideally zero.

Real numbers from your device and connection, not a screenshot of a score I chose. Nothing is sent anywhere. The measurement happens in your browser and stays there. If one of these ever reads amber on my own site, you will see it, which is rather the point. I audit these for £650.