How to Read Your Website Security Scan Report
Grades, scores and findings can be overwhelming. Here is how to interpret a security scan and decide what to fix first.
Your first security scan can feel like opening a medical chart in a language you do not speak. There is a letter grade, a number out of 100, a list of findings in red and amber, and a lot of acronyms. This guide turns that report into a clear plan: what each part means, and what to do about it first.
The grade and the score
At the top you will usually see a letter grade (A+ to F) and a numeric score. The grade is a quick, shareable summary; the score is the underlying detail. A site can sit at the bottom of one grade band or the top of another, so a jump from, say, 74 to 76 might move you a whole letter. Treat the score as the thing you are actually improving and the grade as the headline.
An A means the common, high-impact checks pass. It does not mean your application logic is perfect. Use it to confirm the basics are right, then keep going.
Findings: severity is everything
Below the grade is the list of findings. The single most important column is severity, because it tells you where to spend your limited time. A sensible order of attack is:
- 1Critical / High — fix today. These are actively exploitable, such as a missing HTTPS redirect or an expired certificate.
- 2Medium — fix this week. Things like a missing security header that weakens a defence-in-depth layer.
- 3Low / Informational — fix when convenient, or accept the risk consciously. Often hardening niceties rather than open doors.
Reading an individual finding
A good finding answers three questions: what is wrong, why it matters, and how to fix it. If your report only gives you the first one — 'Content-Security-Policy not set' — you are left to research the rest yourself. The most useful reports include a plain-English explanation of the risk and a copy-paste-ready fix tailored to your server.
PatchPings pairs every finding with an AI-written explanation and the exact configuration snippet for your stack, so understanding the problem and solving it happen in the same step.
Watching trends over time
A single scan is a snapshot. The real value comes from history. When every scan is saved and grouped by domain, you can watch grades climb as you apply fixes and — just as importantly — catch regressions the moment a deploy quietly reintroduces a problem. A score that drops from A to C overnight is a signal that something changed in your infrastructure.
Turning a report into a routine
The teams that stay secure are not the ones who run a perfect scan once. They are the ones who scan regularly, fix the top findings each time, and treat the score as a number that should only ever go up. Read your report top-down, fix by severity, save the history, and rescan after every meaningful change. That simple loop is what separates a site that drifts into vulnerability from one that gets steadily harder to attack.
