No HTTPS
Browsers label the site “Not secure” before a buyer reads a word.
Partner Digital Readiness Assessment
Know whether the partner sites you fund are working for you.
Your partners' websites carry your brand to buyers you'll never meet. The Partner Digital Readiness Assessment gives every one of them an objective scorecard; is the site safe, usable, and findable, and is it actually selling you?
The assessment is powered by SiteGrade, ThinkTrail Solutions' website assessment engine. It builds on Google Lighthouse and adds the checks that matter to a channel organization.
The Blind Spot in Partner Marketing
Money goes out. Hope comes back.
Channel organizations invest real marketing funds in their partners, and much of that marketing lands on partner websites. Yet there is rarely an objective way to confirm those sites meet a baseline. How do you know the investment is working?
Broken accessibility
Keyboard and screen-reader users can't get through, and the risk sits with a site that carries your brand.
Missing SEO basics
No page titles or descriptions, so buyers searching for a solution never find the partner.
Off-message
Your products are nowhere on the site, and competitors are named instead. Your funds are promoting someone else.
Checking this by hand across dozens or hundreds of partners doesn't scale. Measuring it automatically does.
What We Assess
Two questions for every partner site.
Each assessment crawls up to 100 pages of a partner's site and answers two questions separately, so a technically clean site can't hide a sales problem.
Site Health
Is the site safe, usable, and findable?
- Security: HTTPS, certificate health, and browser security headers.
- Accessibility: contrast, form labels, and keyboard and screen-reader barriers.
- SEO: page titles, descriptions, crawlability, and sitemaps.
- Best practices: error-free code, broken links, and modern web standards.
Weighted by business consequence into one grade per partner. Critical failures, such as a site that isn't served securely, can't be averaged away.
Partner Alignment
Is the site selling you?
- Your products present: the products and solutions you fund partners to sell appear on their site.
- Competitors absent: the site you're funding isn't promoting a competing offer.
- You own the lists: you confirm which products and competitors count, and we update them as your portfolio changes.
Scored separately from Site Health. A site can earn an A on security and still score zero here.
Also reported: page-load performance and Core Web Vitals, for information. Performance varies from run to run, so it doesn't count toward the grade.
What You Get Back
Every partner gets a scorecard. Every scorecard tells a story.
A letter grade and score per partner, a breakdown by category, and a prioritized list of what to fix. Each scorecard is ready for your partner managers to take into quarterly business reviews. The samples below come from sites we operate, with names removed.
Sample scorecard
Overall grade
C · 76.8
- Security94A
- Accessibility48.5F
- SEO81B
- Best practices92A
- Performance (information only)55F
The story: the site looks secure and findable at a glance, but an accessibility failure is turning buyers away. The scorecard shows what a quick look would miss.
What the partner should fix first.
-
Important
Text doesn't have enough contrast (5 pages)
Low-contrast text is difficult or impossible for many visitors to read. Adjust text and background colours to meet WCAG contrast ratios.
-
Important
Form fields have no labels (40% of pages)
Screen-reader users can't tell what a field is for, so they can't complete the form. Associate a visible label with every input.
-
Important
Pages have no meta description (site-wide)
Search engines improvise the snippet under the result link, often badly. Add a concise description to each page.
Measured, fixed, verified.
Security
D63First assessment
A94Next-day reassessment
The first assessment found five missing browser security headers. They were added, and the next-day reassessment confirmed the improvement. That's the cycle the assessment is built for: find it, fix it, prove it.
Partner Alignment at a glance.
- Your products3 of 5Present
- Competitors1 of 7Found
Each list passes or fails, and every match is shown in context with the page it appeared on. The conversation with the partner starts from evidence, not opinion.
Across your partner base: a portfolio summary report ranks every assessed partner and consolidates the prioritized recommendations. Reports are delivered as web, PDF, and Word documents.
Automated testing finds a meaningful share of accessibility issues, but not all of them. An accessibility score is a floor that shows risk. It is not a certification of accessibility compliance.
How an Engagement Runs
A recurring cycle, not a one-time report.
The value comes from repetition: set the baseline, drive the fixes, and reassess until failing sites are brought up to the bar.
Scope
You share the partner list and confirm the products and competitors that matter.
Baseline
We assess every site and deliver individual scorecards, a portfolio summary, and prioritized recommendations.
Remediate
Your partner managers take the scorecards into business reviews. Partners get a specific, measurable fix list.
Reassess
At 90 days we reassess and compare, so funding decisions can rest on measurable site quality.
Your Team
- Provide the partner site list
- Confirm your product and competitor keyword lists
- Drive remediation with partners, using the scorecards
ThinkTrail Solutions
- Assessment, scoring, and partner alignment analysis
- Individual partner scorecards with commentary
- Portfolio summary with prioritized recommendations
- Scheduled reassessments to measure progress
How We Assess
Rigorous with the results. Respectful of the sites.
Your partners' websites are their business. The assessment is designed to measure them fairly and to leave them exactly as it found them.
Traceable
Every finding states what's wrong, why it matters, and how to fix it. When a partner asks “why did we get a C?”, there's a line-by-line answer.
Consistent
The same rules apply to every partner, every time. Reassessments are directly comparable to the baseline.
Courteous
Our crawler identifies itself, respects robots.txt, paces its requests, and works within strict limits. It measures; it never load-tests.
Start with a Conversation
See how your partner sites measure up.
Tell us about your partner base and the products you need represented. We'll scope an assessment around it, starting with the partners you already have questions about.