It’s important, but not as important as the scores for each of the individual checks. The checks take you through all the major aspects of your site, such as keywords, URL, title tags, backlinks and the number of pages. Each check gives you a score so that you can easily see where your website needs some work.

I do provide a total score at the end but this is really just a guideline, for several reasons:

• Every website has different goals, so the relative importance of each check is different for each. For example, a successful blog site should score highly on update frequency, but this would be less important in a site with static pages
• I’m not comparing different sites so the overall score doesn’t really matter. It’s not a competition but it is about making your website better
• I’m not trying to guess Google’s algorithms for ranking pages. Firstly, it’s a secret and secondly I’m not providing scores based on search results. A lot of the checks do relate to factors that are important to Google though, since improving these will give you a better website

If you run through the Website Stress Test checks and make some improvements based on the individual scores, your overall score will improve (a nice motivator, I think!)