How a SwimScore is calculated

Last updated 3 September 2026

Every school in the directory is graded on the same eleven factors, each worth a fixed number of points out of 100. This page lists all of them, what each is worth, and the exact checks behind them, so you can see how your own number was reached.

What we looked at

The score is produced from your public website. We read the homepage and follow the internal links a parent would follow, pricing, schedule, register, contact, and read those pages too. Across the 1,468 scored schools the median crawl read 31 pages of a site. Nothing private is used: no analytics, no traffic figures, no account of yours. The one outside source is your public Google Business Profile rating, which feeds a single factor.

The directory holds 1,706 schools. 1,468 carry a full scorecard. Of the rest, 198 could not be read well enough to grade and 40 did not load at all when we tried. None of those carries a number: the listing stays so the directory is complete, and the page says the site has not been checked rather than showing a zero.

The eleven factors

The weights are fixed and identical for every school. Two thirds of the score is about whether a parent can find what they need and book it; one third is technical health.

“Sites checked” is how many of the 1,468 scored schools had enough evidence for that factor to count at all. On the rest it was dropped from the scale.

The five technical factors were measured two different ways, depending on when a site was read. On 816 of them the score comes from reading the page markup, against the checks listed further down. On the other 652 it comes straight from Google PageSpeed Insights, run against a phone, and Google’s own 0 to 100 score is used as the factor score without adjustment. Each factor below says which applies, and your scorecard shows it too: PageSpeed cards carry Google’s wording, such as Improve Largest Contentful Paint, rather than ours.

When we could not check something

This is the part owners ask about most, so it is worth stating plainly. Three situations look similar and are not scored the same way.

• We looked, and it is not there. That is a finding about the site. It scores zero and the full weight still counts. No online booking anywhere on a site we read 31 pages of is a real answer, not a gap in our knowledge.
• We could not establish it either way. The factor is removed from both sides of the sum. It cannot cost you points and it cannot earn you any. Your scorecard lists it among the points we could not check.
• The site would not load, or we could not read it. No score is published at all. The listing stays so the directory is complete, and the page says so rather than showing a zero.

The same rule applies inside a factor. CTA & Contact is five checks worth 25, 25, 20, 15 and 15 points. If two of them could not be established, the factor score is what you earned out of the 60 points that remain, not out of 100.

Reading that as 63 out of 100 would be wrong, and it is why the scorecard prints the second number beside the first.

Bands

The colour band comes from the share of the points that were available to you, never from the raw number. A school scored 63 out of 82 sits in the same band as a school scored 77 out of 100.

The wording printed beside the score, Excellent foundation, Good, with gaps, Needs work, Losing families, is set from the point total on its own, at 85, 70 and 50. On a site with an unverified factor that wording can read one step harsher than the band. The share is the fairer of the two and is the one to go by.

The two halves

A scorecard also shows two sub-scores. They are the same points, grouped, and each is given as a percentage of its own half rather than of the whole:

• Booking & conversion, 66 points. Online Booking, Design & First Impression, CTA & Contact, Prices & Schedule, Online Payment, Reviews & Social Proof.
• Technical health, 34 points. Performance & Speed, Mobile Experience, SEO & Findability, Security & Best Practices, Accessibility.

Design sits with conversion rather than with the technical half, because a parent who leaves on the first impression never reaches the booking page at all.

Every check, factor by factor

The full list, 48 rules in all. The grey lines under each rule are the exact sentences that appear on a scorecard, so you can match a line on your page to the rule that produced it. A + earns the points; a − does not.

Online Booking 18 points of 100

Whether a parent can book or register online without waiting for a reply. One outcome rather than a sum of parts, so the tiers below are exclusive.

Design & First Impression 12 points of 100

Whether the site reads as a real, current business in the first few seconds.

CTA & Contact 10 points of 100

Whether the ways to get in touch are present and visible. Five checks, and the factor score is what you earned out of the ones we could establish.

Prices & Schedule 10 points of 100

Whether a parent can see what it costs and when classes run, without having to ask.

Online Payment 8 points of 100

Whether money can change hands online, directly or through the booking platform.

Reviews & Social Proof 8 points of 100

Your public Google rating sets the ceiling. What is on the page can fill it, never exceed it.

Performance & Speed 10 points of 100

How quickly the page becomes usable on a phone.

Mobile Experience 10 points of 100

Whether the page is built for a phone screen at all.

SEO & Findability 8 points of 100

Whether a search engine can read the page and show it properly.

Security & Best Practices 3 points of 100

Whether the connection is secure and the site is live rather than parked.

Accessibility 3 points of 100

Whether the page works for a visitor using a screen reader or other assistive tech.

What this score is not

• It is not a judgement of your teaching. Nothing here looks at your instructors, your curriculum, your safety record or your results. It measures a website.
• It is not a certified audit. It is an automated read of public pages, and an automated read can be wrong: a booking system behind a login we could not follow, a phone number drawn inside an image, a page that served us something other than what it serves a parent.
• It is not a live number. A score reflects the site as it was on the day we read it. Changes since then are not picked up until the site is read again.
• It does not rank you against schools we have not measured. A comparison only holds between two schools scored on the same available points.

If something is wrong

If a check on your scorecard is wrong, tell us. We will read the site again and correct the page. Email hello@getswimgrow.com with the line you are disputing. A correction costs nothing and does not require you to buy anything. You can also ask us to remove your school from the directory entirely, and we will, without asking why.