Getting started

A complete walkthrough of your first scan — from entering your URL to getting actionable fixes.

Step 1 — Enter your URL

From your dashboard, click New project and enter the root URL of the site you want to audit (e.g. https://yoursite.com). Evalta will immediately crawl your site to discover all your pages.

The crawl follows internal links and reads your sitemap if one is available. Most sites are fully discovered in under 30 seconds. JavaScript-rendered sites (React, Vue, Angular) take a little longer since we use a full browser to find pages accurately.

You can scan any publicly accessible website — not just sites you own. This makes Evalta useful for auditing competitor sites or reviewing client work before handoff.

Step 2 — Select pages for performance analysis

Once your pages are discovered, you'll be asked which ones to include in the performance analysis (PSI). This step is optional — if you skip it, Evalta defaults to scanning your home page only.

Which pages should I choose?

Choose the pages that matter most to your business goals:

Home page — always worth including. It's usually your highest-traffic page and the first impression for new visitors.
Key landing pages — pages you're running ads to or targeting specific keywords with. Slow load times here directly hurt conversion rates and ad quality scores.
High-traffic pages — check Google Analytics or Search Console to find your most visited pages. These have the most to gain from performance improvements.
Product or service pages — where users make purchase decisions. Fast load times and good SEO here directly affect revenue.

Pro accounts can select up to 10 pages, Agency up to 25. You don't need to select everything — a focused set of your most important pages is more useful than scanning dozens of low-traffic pages.

Your page selection is saved and reused on every future scan. You can update it at any time from Project settings → Performance pages.

Step 3 — The base scan runs

Click Start scan. Evalta runs Google PageSpeed Insights on each of your selected pages (mobile and desktop), checks your SEO — meta tags, heading structure, internal links, structured data, and more — and prepares your results.

Most base scans complete in 2-5 minutes depending on how many pages you selected and how fast your site responds.

You don't need to wait

You can close the browser tab and come back later. Your scan will keep running in the background. When it's done, you'll receive an email notification with a link to your results.

Manage your email notification preferences at any time from Account settings → Notifications or from within your project settings. You can control which alerts you receive — scan completion, score drops, and more.

Step 4 — Optional: run a content scan (Pro/Agency)

Once the base scan is complete, you'll see your performance and SEO results. Pro and Agency users can also run a content scan for deeper analysis.

What is a content scan?

A content scan uses AI to analyse the written content on each of your pages. It checks:

Content depth and quality — is there enough substance for Google to consider this page authoritative?
Thin content — pages with very little text that are unlikely to rank
Heading structure — are your H1, H2, H3 tags used correctly and logically?
Keyword relevance — does the content clearly match what the page is about?
Readability — is the content written at an appropriate level for your audience?

Why run a content scan?

Google's ranking algorithm weighs content quality heavily. A technically fast site with thin or unfocused content will still struggle to rank. The content scan gives you a Content score alongside your Audit score so you have a complete picture of your site's SEO health.

Content scans take longer than the base scan — typically 5-15 minutes depending on page count and content length. Like the base scan, they run in the background and you'll be notified when complete.

Step 5 — Review your results

Your report has three scores at the top and two tabs below.

Your three scores

Overall score — a combined score across performance, SEO, and content. This is your headline number and the one to track over time.
Audit score — technical health: page speed, Core Web Vitals, meta tags, structured data, and SEO fundamentals. Based on Google PageSpeed Insights data.
Content score — content quality across your pages. Only shows after a content scan has been run.

Performance tab

Shows all detected issues grouped by page. Each page expands to show its specific issues sorted by severity — Critical first, then Warning, then Minor. The LCP time is shown per page — this is Google's primary performance metric and the one that most directly affects rankings.

Issues include specific details — the affected resource URL, how much time or bytes could be saved, and a link to open the AI chat for that issue.

Content tab

Shows content analysis results per page. If you haven't run a content scan yet, you'll see an option to start one here. After the content scan runs, each page gets a content score and specific issues around thin content, heading structure, and content quality.

Score history

Expand the score history chart to see how your scores have changed across scans. This is the most useful view for tracking progress — you can see whether your fixes are actually moving the needle over time.

Start with the Critical issues. These have the biggest impact on performance and rankings. A single Critical fix — like removing lazy loading from your hero image — can improve your LCP by several seconds.

Step 6 — Fix issues with the AI agent

Click any issue to open the AI agent for that specific problem. This is where Evalta is different from other audit tools.

What the agent knows

The agent already has full context — your PSI data, your page HTML, what's causing the issue, and your site's tech stack. You don't need to paste anything or explain the problem. Just open the chat and start reading.

What the agent tells you

The agent gives you a specific, actionable fix — not generic advice like “optimise your images.” It references your actual page elements, gives you the exact code or setting to change, and explains in plain English why the issue is affecting your users and rankings.

If you're on Next.js, it gives Next.js-specific advice. If you're on WordPress, it tells you which plugin setting to change. It knows your stack and speaks your language.

After making a fix

Make the change, then click Re-scan inside the chat. The agent compares the before and after, tells you whether the fix worked, quantifies the improvement (“LCP dropped from 3.8s to 1.9s”), and tells you what to tackle next. If the fix didn't move the needle, it takes a different angle rather than repeating the same recommendation.

Tracking your progress

Every fix that improves a metric gets credited to your project stats. Your overall score updates with each scan. Over time, the score history chart shows you the cumulative impact of all your improvements.

You don't need to fix everything at once. Start with one Critical issue, fix it, re-scan, confirm it worked, then move to the next. The agent will remember what you've tried and what's still outstanding.