Custom PHP and Flat-File Builds
Complete control, no defaults, and every finding is a quick fix in the sense that you can reach the code. Whether anybody wrote that code is the question.
What tends to go wrong here
A hand-built PHP site does exactly what its author told it to and nothing else. There is no plugin adding structured data behind your back and no theme wrapping the logo in an H1. There is also nothing emitting a sitemap, a canonical, or an Organization node unless someone wrote that.
Where the findings land
- Easy To Fix
- Everything, in the shared template or layout. One file, every page.
- Harder To Fix
- Nothing, structurally. The constraint is time rather than the build.
- Usually Structural
- Slow response times when the application queries a database on every request with no caching. That is an architecture repair rather than a markup one.
Worth knowing
Custom builds produce the widest range of inspection results of anything on this list, because everything depends on what the author decided mattered. They also produce the fastest repairs once you know what is missing.
Others in Frameworks and Custom Builds
- Next.js Next.js can produce the cleanest server-rendered output on this list or the emptiest app shell, depending entirely on the rendering mode chosen per route.
- React Single-Page Applications The classic structural case. If the content only exists after the bundle runs, the inspection sees what an AI retriever sees, which is nothing.
- Static Site Generators Astro, Hugo, Eleventy, Jekyll and their relatives produce plain HTML files, which is the best starting position on this list.
Find out which of these apply to you
Everything above is what usually happens on this platform. The inspection tells you what is actually happening on your page.