What we shipped this week: more honest reports, cleaner results

I haven't posted here since April. Website Analyzer started as a hobby, but a lot has improved since then, including the changes below. I'm on a career break now and putting much more time and resources into making it genuinely useful to people.

A few days of work went live on Website Analyzer this week. There is no new headline feature. Most of it was about one idea: a report that is wrong but confident is worse than no report at all.

So the tool now says less when it knows less, and the results page got a consistency pass so that what you see means the same thing everywhere. There are a couple of smaller additions too, and one known issue we found while testing.

Here is what shipped.

Platform detection now needs proof

The hosting and CDN detection used to name platforms on weak signals. That produced embarrassing results: at one point github.com itself was being misdetected.

Now a platform is only named when there is independent proof. GitHub Pages, for example, is named only when the TLS certificate or the hostname proves it. In practice: pmndrs.github.io is caught correctly, Discord and Shopify still correctly read as Cloudflare, and github.com no longer gets a wrong label. When there is no proof, the report says what it could verify and stops there.

When we cannot measure something, we say so

Previously, a site with no usable page content still got a grade. A low one, with dashes scattered through the sections. That reads as "we measured this and it failed" when in fact nothing was measured at all. Misleading.

That whole class of failure is now handled honestly. Security grades with named failed checks, so you can see exactly what failed rather than inferring it from a letter. Cross-host redirects are detected and named: analyze yandex.ru and the report tells you it redirected to dzen.ru, and that the redirect means no page content was served to grade. Action items and "what's working" are no longer generated from categories that could not be measured.

A wrong-but-confident report became an honest partial one. That is a trade I will take every time.

Results page refresh

The results page got a visual pass, mostly about consistency:

- Verdict colors (red, amber, green) now appear only on actual results, not as decoration. Color means something again.- One score component everywhere: number, label, bar. The same score looks the same wherever it shows up.- Empty states are one compact line instead of icon heroes.- Gaps are labeled "Not measured" instead of showing a bare dash.- Amber caveats now sit docked to the scores they qualify.- Technology evidence shows as clean rows with sources and timestamps.- "New analysis" moved to a header button.- External report links (hosting, WHOIS, SSLShopper) use one consistent compact button pattern.

None of these is dramatic on its own. Together they make the page feel like one thing instead of several.

SSL verification

Every report now includes a "Verify on SSLShopper" cross-check, so you can confirm the SSL finding against an independent source in one click. Trust but verify applies to the tool too.

Better errors

The old "Domain analysis limit reached" error is gone. It told you nothing and gave you nothing.

In its place: honest partial reports. If a site blocks the scan, you get "Limited analysis - access denied" plus whatever could still be verified, like the response headers and the SSL configuration via an independent probe. A partial answer beats an error page.

As always, if something looks off, the feedback link at the bottom of every results page comes straight to me. You can also email feedback@websiteanalyzer.dev.

More soon.

You can now rate any report with one click. If you would like to share more, tell me what would bring you back in this 30-second survey.